For those interested in listening to Susan read these poems aloud, she has graciously provided a recording
Consider the Bleeding Hearts
extravagant liberals
plunging purpling into spring
burgeoning blushing
then drooping into summer
followed by fall's free-fall
scattering seed pods everywhere
such superabundance
in heart-shaped petals
such suchness
in these wild core hearts.
Consider the Sandhill Cranes
trumpeting courting
crying from coiled trachea
flying between worlds
red-masked eyeing each other coyly
hopping and fluttering
their prehistoric dance
echo makers bird gods
wafting on thermal winds
landing in damp marsh
their rattle and hum reinventing time
dropping into our laps
a kind of longevity
their one-legged stance
a stillness
bestowing on our senses
this now
Consider the Bearded Lichen in symbiosis with fungi and algae filaments intertwine in mutuality no harm to the Douglas fir living on its surface no laying down of roots feeding through its own photosynthesis wispy bearded one white cord at centre of each strand hibernating and reviving resilient elder in fossil record 400-600 million years provides antibiotics makes breakfast for wintering caribou first to reappear in forests after a fire whitish-yellow-grey tree gnomes just hanging in till we join the enlichenment
Consider the June Snow
soft puffy galaxies suspended in air
float their neurons down
spinning slipstreams of white
that land on a path by the Fraser
ephemeral dancers
down down tumbling
from green catkins
of tall black mother trees
cottonwoods intent on scattering
seed pods
some poising briefly
on a dog's nose
others suffering cement
and trampling
some swiftly dreaming
in moist sod
imagining deep roots
long shoots
Consider the Western Red Cedar
aromatherapist
out of whose inner bark Kwantlen crafters
wove ceremonial capes, canoes
Halq'eméylem language drifting in boughs and bowers
through her beautiful brain
wrapping round its syllables, chanting
fungi interfacing nourishment to saplings
stretching northsoutheastwest
arched boughs swooping earthward
then rising
sun-gatherers
her elderdom intuits our hands
pressed gently against her lichened layers
inviting us to join the round and round
antics of grey squirrels
our threescore and ten
a mere dewdrop
against her old growth glades
the secret gift of her attention and ours
leaning together in this
zero
and
everything
zone
Consider the Hydrangea
Serrata Miranda
water vessel
garden queen
erect on her stem
flaunts her seeded lace cap
rimmed by sepals'
violet-blue blooms -
a blue beyond names
A human bends
at the rim of a forested ravine
ledge between cultivated and wild
inbreathes Miranda's
exquisite shadings,
awed by her deft design
asks the Queen's permission
to cut a single bloom
Miranda bows nods
holies the evening meal
Consider the Millipede
or
if not
herself
then
her
thousand
tiny
feet
or if not
her prints
then her
delicate
calligraphy
elongated
haiku
caught
between
sand
and
sky
these
fragile
signatures
all too
briefly
here
the
artisan
embedded
deep
down
cherish
her
lovelorn
love
letters
whoever
has eyes
let them
feel
Consider the Southern Cross
long before Jesus, before time
a cosmic constellation flared
crosswise on a crossroad’s
vertical/horizontal conjunction
both here and there, inner and outer
spangling night sky
further north in Dante’s time
then not visible in Italy
yet Dante dreamed it into his Paradiso
placing it among the order of angels
where he stood at the ledge
with Beatrice beatitude and guide
who set her gaze on point zero
where we disappear and are remade
where the many and the one
and all apparent opposites
sing union
Susan McCaslin is the author of seventeen volumes of poetry and ten chapbooks. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia in 1984 and taught at Douglas College in B.C. in the English and Creative Writing Departments from 1984-2007. Her most recent volumes of poetry are Consider (Aeolus House, 2023) and Sentient Stones (Raven Chapbooks, 2023). She resides in Fort Langley, British Columbia, where she initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to protect a rainforest near the Fraser River.