Nowhere Else In the World: Guest Post

I am beyond thrilled and honored to present a guest post on my blog today. My co-founding member of our local writing group, Helen Sadler, has shared a piece of poetry. Helen and I met while I was working on my doctorate. I was conducting focus groups for my study, interviewing members of the National Writing Project. Helen volunteered to be part of my study, and thinking back, I can't imagine if she hadn't. My life has been so enriched by the experiences we now share.

Being a part of NWP is a life changing experience in itself, it is the whole reason I conducted my doctoral research in the first place. Any member can attest to it. But as a researcher, I had to maintain neutrality. I barely participated in the discussions, just prompted and facilitated. You have to be objective when collecting data. The connection however, is there. And I am ever so grateful, Helen and I struck up a sort of writing partnership and beautiful friendship following the completion of my research. We started a writing circle, and three plus years later, here we are. Thank you Helen, for answering my call for study participants, and walking with me on the writing journey.

To everyone else, Helen read my last two blogs (she reads my blog daily and also shares my love of nature) and offered to guest blog because she was inspired by Marjory Stoneman Douglas' words in the found poetry of my students. Enjoy a bit of brilliance from one of my favorite writers- and I am referring to Helen, not Marjory. Though they're both pretty great!

Guest Post by Helen Sadler

I first fell in love with the Everglades and south Florida in 1989, when we made a trip down to Marco Island for a convention, then drove across Tamiami Trail and stayed two nights in Everglades National Park. I was not aware at the time what dire circumstances the amazing River of Grass was in – I just knew that what I was seeing was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

I never dreamed I would be living in South Florida, or that I would receive the benefits of the Everglades skies and sunsets consistently in my life.  I never dreamed I would attend a university that would teach me so much about this environment, unique and magical, like no where else in the world.

I have gone to the source, the great book by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and I have pulled her words to create a poem told in three vignettes, the middle one taking her words into haiku forms.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Marjory, for your work that began the awareness of the greatness of nature in our midst – one that should never be lost.

No Where Else in the World

A found poem from The Everglades River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas

I.  The Water

“Pa-hay-okee” say the Seminoles, “Grassy Water.”

An everglades kite questing in solitary circles,

Rising and dipping and rising again.

Egrets and white ibis and glossy ibis and little blue herons,

            Thousands nested and circled and fed.

Saw grass reaches up both sides of the lake

            In great enclosing arms.

The grass and the water together make the river,

            Simple and unique.

Only one force can conquer it completely: fire.

Yet here rain falls more powerfully and logically

            Than anywhere else in the United States.

On summer mornings over the Glades the sky is

            Only faintly hazed.

By noon, the first ranks of clouds, cottony and growing,

            Whip to glistening heights.

By late August and September, afterglows of tremendous

            Summer sunsets, pure rose and violet and ultimate blue.

Lumpy, soft, permeable limestone called “oolitic.”

To understand the Everglades means you must

            Understand rock.

On the east coast, rivers broke through the rock rim

            In a series of low waterfalls and rapids.

Snapper Creek and its ferny, rocky dam and

            Fresh-water springs bubbling clear.

The limestone tips very gently downward to the south

            Until it disappears in the shallow waters of Florida Bay.

The water is timeless, forever new and eternal.

Only yesterday, they say, the Floridian plateau was lifted up,

            Long after the quails and the swifts and the flamingos,

            The warblers and the water snakes, the owls, the woodpeckers

            And the alligators have assumed their present forms.

There came one last heaving and changing

            The east edge of it a little higher,

            The west sloping back gradually to the sea,

            A mere geologic yesterday.

II. The Wildlife

Florida deer

Step neatly at edge of pine

In forests like these.

Brown wildcats know them.

The clear light falls mottled through

Branches faintly green.

Green lizards puff out

Their throats like thin red bubbles

A silent love call.

Resurrection ferns

First rain startles to green life

Pale green slender stalk.

Brilliant coral snake

Spiders stretch exquisite traps

Small brown scorpions

Native orchids, yellow and white

Pale-rose, whorled and etched tree snails

Coconut palms rise above.

III. The Wave

The sea has risen.

It is there now.

The shape of this land is established.

Time moves again for the Everglades,

Not in ages and in centuries,

But as man knows it.

In hours and days,

The small events of his own lifetime,

Who was among the last of the living forms to invade its shores.

But some things cannot be changed.

Like the rock. The mangrove. The cypress tree.

The shadowy light and canopy of green,

The flotsam of sea, the long seed, the tide,

Endless sea currents

and mud

and mystery.