liturgy of the wood
prayer looks different to each
the salmon, whipping out of water to skyworld
the otter paw wrapped with paw, weightless
the eagle, at last rid of the crows and gulls, silhouetted atop the lone pine
the squirrel, in his spare time, makes a rosary
and have you seen the cathedral?
somewhere between a haven and a heaven
soon midnight mass begins with the chorale
of the thrush.
A little winnie-the-pooh-core this week. One of my favorite writers, Robert MacFarlane, has a couple of books called The Lost Spells (I may have mentioned them before). These consist of adorable little “summoning spells” for creatures of the woods. They read like tongue twisters and small poems but I find the playful tone really endearing and also just love the idea.
I recently heard in an interview with Amitav Ghosh this line: “This is the great burden that now rests upon writers, artists, filmmakers, and everyone else who is involved in the telling of stories: to us falls the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans. As with all the most important artistic endeavors in human history, this is a task that is at once aesthetic and political—and because of the magnitude of the crisis that besets the planet, it is now freighted with the most pressing moral urgency.”
I don’t know what to do with that, ha … but I love it and am thinking a lot about it lately. Any ideas?