How Nature Shapes
My Poetry
There is a quiet power in my home landscape, the backdrop to my writing. Mud Creek winds alongside my native prairie garden, framed by black walnut trees, pines, willows, cottonwoods, mulberries, birches, box elders, and dogwoods. Each season brings its own rhythm, textures, and songs.
Spring awakens the garden with soft, tentative green. Fish stir beneath the creek’s surface, while toads, frogs, and spring peepers chorus from wetland edges. Turtles emerge to bask on sun-warmed banks. The scent of damp earth rises after a thaw, mingling with the faint perfume of early blooms. Bees and butterflies take their first flights, discovering wildflowers and abundant milkweed, carrying life across the garden in delicate arcs.
Summer hums with activity. Fireflies blink like tiny lanterns above tall prairie grasses at dusk, bats swoop gracefully over the hill, and birds fill the canopy with song: robins, cardinals, orioles, blue jays, chickadees, and hummingbirds. The air is warm, heavy with the scent of blooming wildflowers—black-eyed Susans, purple coneflowers, wild bergamot, and swamp milkweed—and the low, constant buzz of pollinators.
Sunlight filters through leafy trees, casting dappled patterns across the garden. Deer wander quietly along the hill and bed under towering pines, unafraid and accustomed to my presence. Eagles, hawks, owls, and great blue herons patrol the skies and wetlands, their calls a steady, majestic presence in the landscape.
Fall paints the land in gold, crimson, and bronze. Changing leaves glow with gold and fire along the creek, and prairie grasses bend beneath soft, cool breezes. Leaves crackle underfoot, and the air carries the tang of wood smoke and the rich scent of decaying foliage. Birds call and chatter as they fatten for migration, while foxes and raccoons move silently through the undergrowth. The late-season blooms—New England asters and goldenrod—feed pollinators before frost.
Winter hushes the garden beneath snow and ice. Mud Creek slows under a glassy sheen, and the prairie bends silently under frosted grasses. Deer and turkeys find shelter among evergreens and mature trees, their breaths visible in the cold morning air. Woodpeckers tap against bare trunks, chickadees flit through snow-laden branches, and the occasional red cardinal flares against white drifts. Even in dormancy, the land pulses with subtle life: tracks in the snow, the faint hum of winter insects, and the slow resilience of roots beneath frozen soil.
Nature has always been both muse and mirror. In my earliest poems, I found myself listening—to bird songs at dawn, the rustle of prairie grasses, the croak of frogs, the shimmer of bats at twilight, and the hush of winter snow. I learned to hear the pause between sounds, the subtle shift in wind through the trees, the quiet weight of stillness. These observations became more than backdrop; they shaped my language, my rhythm, and the attention I bring to human experience. Poetry became a conversation with the land: listening first, shaping second.
When I wrote Salt and Soil, the creek and prairie were constant companions. I remember standing on the edge of the garden after a spring thaw, watching fish stir beneath the surface while toads called from the wet edges, the scent of damp earth rising around me. The cadence of those moments informed several poems, threading the rhythm of the natural world into lines and stanzas.
With Earth and Echo, I explored how the landscape carries memory—prairie remnants, abandoned farms, and hidden woodlands are repositories of time, resilience, and change. Observing them allows me to trace threads between the land and human experience, revealing connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. My upcoming book, River and Root, continues this exploration, deepening the dialogue between the land, wildlife, and human reflection.
Writing is also an ethical practice. Paying attention to nature is a commitment: to witness, to record, and to honor. It asks us to see how humans impact the world and how the world shapes us in return. My writing reflects both tenderness and quiet ferocity—the recognition that beauty and fragility exist side by side. In every line, I attempt to hold that tension, to convey the ethical and emotional weight of observation.
Finally, poetry is meant to be shared. When readers open Salt and Soil, Earth and Echo, or River and Root, they enter not only the poems but the landscapes that shaped them—Mud Creek, the native prairie, flowering shrubs, towering trees, and the wildlife that moves silently among them. Writing is a way to plant seeds, to invite others into observation, and perhaps, to inspire care for the world that sustains us.
For anyone who walks quietly through the natural world, who pauses to notice textures, colors, scents, and rhythms of life, poetry offers a way to carry those observations beyond the moment. Nature is teacher and companion, and through it, words take root, grow, and sometimes, like bats at dusk or eagles on the wing, take flight.
Writing as Activism: Poetry in Civic Life
Poetry begins in observation—in noticing the overlooked, the silenced, the small truths that ripple across the world. For me, words are inseparable from responsibility. Writing is a way to witness injustice, amplify marginalized voices, and confront the extreme inequalities embedded in society through poetry and activism. It is an act of care, reflection, and insistence that the unseen and unheard matter.
I write mindful of the Indigenous peoples whose lands I inhabit, honoring their stewardship and resilience while acknowledging the violent colonization that displaced communities, erased cultures, and imposed foreign governance. That history is not distant; its effects ripple through our cities, neighborhoods, and landscapes. Poetry allows me to hold that truth without flattening it—exploring memory and presence, trauma and hope.
In classrooms, public readings, and workshops, poetry serves as a subtle but powerful form of activism. Lines of verse create space to confront inequities, question systems of power, and illuminate human experience from perspectives often ignored. By turning attention to the stories of those marginalized by race, class, gender, and circumstance, I strive to make the invisible visible and the silenced heard.
Social justice and environmental awareness are inseparable in my work. The legacies of colonization, systemic oppression, and ecological neglect inform both the subjects and the ethics of my writing. Poetry becomes a medium for reflection, advocacy, and moral witness—connecting personal attention with collective responsibility. Every stanza invites reflection, empathy, and action.
My books—Salt and Soil, Earth and Echo, and River and Root—continue this conversation. They weave awareness of social inequities, Indigenous histories, and ethical engagement alongside lyrical exploration of the human condition. Through words, readers are invited to notice what they might otherwise overlook, to consider both the ethical and emotional dimensions of their surroundings, and to carry insight into civic life.
Writing as activism does not always shout. Sometimes it hums quietly, insisting that reflection, empathy, and ethical attention have value. A poem can reveal patterns of inequality, the echoes of history, and the resilience of people and communities who endure. Poetry, practiced with awareness and care, becomes both witness and guide—a quiet engine for change, a reminder that attention, reflection, and care are the first steps toward action.
