20 lines to turn 'bird' into a verb

The verb of community,
commune, barely 
makes heads or
tails. Doesn’t set 
the world in 
motion. Doesn’t sketch
the gardener. The way her
gloves fit differently
each season as days, 
time works on her 
hands. The way her 
city fits differently 
each season as days,
time works their way 
in, shaping her 
replaceable, 
irreplaceable 
world of
precious, 
everloving things. 

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I ‘borrowed’ the title for this poem from the first bullet of the WTA (Washington Trails Association) Newsletter which I stumbled upon by accidentally clicking into the dreaded “Promotions” tab of my email. What luck! It was originally “20 hikes to turn ‘bird’ into a verb.

Community is a bit of a buzzword… but it’s also a hard word to use in a poem and therefore a hard concept to find poems about. So I tried.

It was inspired by thinking about the ways in which many indigenous languages (and other languages I’m even less familiar with) often treat words as both noun and verb. The author Robin Wall Kimmerer shares the following in her excellent book Braiding Sweetgrass:

“A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “To be a bay” holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers. Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.[…] This is the grammar of animacy.”