A Poet Actually Living in the Nature Poem | Mary Harwell Sayler Reflects on Her Upcoming Book

A Poet Actually Living in the Nature Poem

Author Mary Harwell Sayler Reflects on Her Upcoming Book

As long as I can remember, I’ve been living in poetry – from hymn lyrics to a Child’s Garden of Verse to the antholo­gies, poetry how-to’s, and books of poems that now fill many book­shelves at home with the works of ancient poets, inter­na­tional poets, nature poets, and most of the con­tem­po­rary Pulitzer-​​prized poets too. I like to read! I like to con­nect with poets and poetry. And I like to exper­i­ment with almost every form.

Often poems come to me with a musical phrase or an unex­pected thought or sight, and I write down those opening words, expecting more to follow but having no idea what that will be. This spon­ta­neous method does not lend itself well to writing a book of poems inten­tion­ally, but to exploring inter­ests, playing with words, and noticing nature – as in, really noticing it.

For most of my life, I’ve lived in small towns or rural areas, but the strongest poetry-​​producing envi­ron­ment came when we moved to our present 100+-year-old home in “the boonies” of North Florida, reached by an unpaved road where the only honking traffic comes from sand­hill cranes. Surrounded by a small thicket of woods, a small pas­ture, and a small lake, we see almost every bird imag­in­able – song­birds, water birds, and birds of prey – each of whom is a fre­quent flyer into my poems.

The morning habit of taking our coffee onto the deck also encour­aged me to notice sights and sounds and poetic per­cus­sions that come when I’m most recep­tive, so nature poems began to make impromptu visits more and more fre­quently. I did not realize, though, just how often or how long I had been living in the nature poem until I dis­cov­ered the nature poetry and envi­ron­men­tally themed non­fic­tion books pub­lished by Hiraeth Press. I really liked what I saw! And so I searched my pub­lished and unpub­lished pieces to see if I had enough nature poems for a book.

I did – not only “bird poems” but poems including human nature and nat­ural bodies ranging in size from our own cells to the cel­lular bodies of stars aloft in the uni­verse. So, even though Living in the Nature Poem began with my per­sonal interest in poetry and any­thing living, I like to think the poems encourage us to con­nect with one other, the earth, and our own nat­ural selves as a vital part of all cre­ation and beyond.

A Brief Synopsis of Synapses

{An excerpt from Living in Nature Poem}

One hundred-​​billion neu­rons

call

to one another

without num­bers.

Lively leaps of faith

repair line breaks

and make con­nec­tions

we can only dream of:

to think, to feel,

to move, to heal.

Success pro­gresses from

this strong neu­ronal song,

to live, to love, to be,

yes,

to belong.