Now, first things first: I need you to know that I could fill an entire post with Mary Oliver poems on nature. In fact, I encourage you to check out posts from fellow Rioters: 5 Quotes from Mary Oliver Poems That Could Save Humanity; A Note of Gratitude to Mary Oliver on Her Birthday; and Buy, Borrow, Bypass: The Call to Language (or The Mary Oliver Edition). My best advice is to just go read all of Mary Oliver. Your soul will thank you. The same would go for Wendell Berry, who is both a poet and a conservationist and has published widely in both poetry and nonfiction about the subject. And in fact, I would encourage you to check out Valerie Michael’s post 100 Must-Read Books About Nature (which include Berry). While not poetry, necessarily, this is a great list of books to help you get in touch with the aforementioned beauty and brutality. And look, William Wordsworth and John Keats don’t need my help. But dang, they wrote a lot about nature. So follow those links if you want to check out the Romantics. Without further ado, let’s get down to some nature poems.
“wild pansy” by lisa bellamy
Excerpt: As a seed, I was shot out the back end of a blue jay when, heedless, she flew over the meadow. She had swallowed me in my homeland when she spied me lying easy under the sun—briefly, I called her Mother before I passed through her gullet like a ghost. (Listen to the audio!)
“putting in the seed” by robert frost
Excerpt: You come to fetch me from my work to-night When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see If I can leave off burying the white Soft petals fallen from the apple tree.
“south” by natasha trethewey
“What I would Like to Grow in my Garden” by katherine riegel
Excerpt: Peonies, heavy and pink as ’80s bridesmaid dresses and scented just the same. Sweet pea, because I like clashing smells and the car I drove in college was named that: a pea-green Datsun with a tendency to backfire.
“summer haibun” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Excerpt: To everything, there is a season of parrots. Instead of feathers, we searched the sky for meteors on our last night. Salamanders use the stars to find their way home. Who knew they could see that far, fix the tiny beads of their eyes on distant arrangements of lights so as to return to wet and wild nests? Our heads tilt up and up and we are careful to never look at each other.
“hermitage” by Joseph Fasano
Excerpt: It’s true there were times when it was too much and I slipped off in the first light or its last hour and drove up through the crooked way of the valley and swam out to those ruins on an island. Blackbirds were the only music in the spruces, and the stars, as they faded out, offered themselves to me
“The Fire” by katie ford
Excerpt: When a human is asked about a particular fire, she comes close: then it is too hot, so she turns her face— and that’s when the forest of her bearable life appears, always on the other side of the fire. The fire she’s been asked to tell the story of, she has to turn from it, so the story you hear is that of pines and twitching leaves and how her body is like neither—
“To the cardinal, attacking his reflection in the window” by Leah Naomi Green
Excerpt: “It is your very self” I tell him. He has never seen me. His quick coin of breath disappears on the glass as it forms: air that feeds his bones their portion willingly as it feeds mine. He spends his here, besieged by the dull birds who gather and whom he cannot touch, his own feathers red as wrought blood.
“hummingbird” by robin becker
Excerpt: I love the whir of the creature come to visit the pink flowers in the hanging basket as she does most August mornings, hours away from starvation to store enough energy to survive overnight.
“mercy beach” by kamilah aisha moon
Excerpt: Stony trails of jagged beauty rise like stretch marks streaking sand-hips. All the Earth has borne beguiles us & battered bodies build our acres.
“a sunset” by ari banias
Excerpt: I watch a woman take a photo of a flowering tree with her phone. A future where no one will look at it, perpetual trembling which wasn’t and isn’t. I have taken photos of a sunset.
“nature aria” by Yi Lei
translated by Tracy K. Smith and Changtai Bi Excerpt: Autumn wind chases in From all directions And a thousand chaste leaves Give way.
“The gray heron” by galway kinnell
Excerpt: It held its head still while its body and green legs wobbled in wide arcs from side to side. When it stalked out of sight, I went after it, but all I could find where I was expecting to see the bird was a three-foot-long lizard in ill-fitting skin and with linear mouth expressive of the even temper of the mineral kingdom.
“marriage” by nicole callihan
Excerpt: & of the lattermath I can only say that with the rain the cattails grew so high that the longing nearly subsided this morning I am all moonshine on the snowbank clockwise back to a better self I am
“merry autumn” by paul laurence dunbar
Excerpt:
“shook foil” by kwame dawes
Excerpt: I The whole earth is filled with the love of God. In the backwoods, the green light is startled by blossoming white petals, soft pathways for the praying bird dipping into the nectar, darting in starts among the tangle of bush and trees.
“frogs eat butterflies. snakes eat frogs. hogs eat snakes. men eat hogs.” by wallace stevens
Excerpt: It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine, Tugging at banks, until they seemed Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs, That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine, The breath of turgid summer, and Heavy with thunder’s rattapallax,
“how the milky way was made” by natalie diaz
Excerpt: My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red- fast flood. Able to take anything it could wet—in a wild rush— all the way to Mexico.
“mulberry fields” by lucille clifton
Excerpt:
“achingly beautiful how the sky blooms umber at the end of the day, through the canopy” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Excerpt: Summers spent practicing in the apartment stairwell: hand on the bannister, one foot after another. Did I ever tell you I couldn’t walk until I was three and then sort of dragged myself up and downstairs until I was seven or eight? That burgundy carpet.
“300 goats” by naomi shihab nye
Excerpt:
“the praying tree” by Melinda Palacio
Excerpt: Ten years of driving the same highway, past the same tree, the picture is at last complete. The eucalyptus tree and narrow birds above a blessed steel sea with no thoughts of yesterday, today, or tomorrow.
“the negro speaks of rivers” by langston hughes
Excerpt: I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
“in the clearing” by patricia hooper
Excerpt: After last night’s rain the woods smell sensual—a mixture of leaves and musk. The morels have disappeared, and soon I’ll come across those yellow chanterelles, the kind they sell in town at the farmers’ market. Once I saw the Swedish woman who raises her own food foraging for them, two blond boys quarreling near the pickup, and the next morning they were selling them from their stand beside the road.
“the world” by jennifer chang
Excerpt:
“at the window” by d.h. lawrence
Excerpt: The pine-trees bend to listen to the autumn wind as it mutters Something which sets the black poplars ashake with hysterical laughter; While slowly the house of day is closing its eastern shutters.
“sonnet” by alice dunbar-nelson
Excerpt: I had no thought of violets of late, The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet In wistful April days, when lovers mate And wander through the fields in raptures sweet. Hit the comments: what are your favorite poems on nature?
