Student Poetry Showcase

This post honors the work of my college students who graciously participated in a class activity during which they created found poetry out of their favorite phrases and words from The Everglades: River of Grass by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. For more details, read yesterday's post. I am not sharing their names because I have written about my experiences in my classroom and wouldn't want to invade anyone's privacy by providing a link back to specific names. I did however, ask their permission to share their work. Though none of this writing is my own, I feel as though it is all birthed from my passion and love for nature and writing, and how I chose to share them both in this way with my students. I am very proud of their work- remember it isn't an English or Creative Writing class. I can't share all 24, but here are a few. Enjoy.

Image from trek earth.com

The Evercycle

Half way down that thrusting sea-bound peninsula.
Grass and water together make the river.
Its stringy and grainy dullness glitters with the myriad unrotted silica points, like glass dust.
To try and make ones way among these impenetrable tufts is to be cut off from air.
Clouds fill with their steely haze and leave only outline of the visible world.
Water falls solid, in sheets, in cascades.
The sawgrass and all those acres of green growing things draw up the water within their cells, use it, and breathe it out again

A Typical Tuesday Night

The Everglades begin at Lake Okeechobee

Saw grass reaches up both sides of that lake in great enclosing arms

Its stands drying to old gold, ready to burst into those red flames

Winds slash before them and the rains roar down, making all the saw grass somber

The lion-colored light shuts down as the rain does

Fiery Glade

Wetness that is sweet among salt
tiny hidden blossoms, luminous in the darkness,
give way to mile high pillars of orange light, roily tangerine
spears thrust into the burning brass
rolling clouds of heavy cream against a hyacinth sky
thin screaming hordes bend in the west wind
they bow, they burn
the fierce fire, lord, power and first cause over the Everglades

The Failing Flame

Rains fall from a vicious white and grey sky

The water winks and flashes 

Saw Grass reaches on both sides

The boiling red flames crackle

The grass yields nothing to the blaze

The Spring rains put out the fires

The River of Time
A man standing in the center of it, if he could get there would be lost in the saw grass.
The green things never quite dry out;
They were changeless, they are the changed.
There are no other Everglades in the world.

Here the rain is everything.
Of air-loving life only a little way out of the salt water,
Grows the Caribbean pine.
They became legendary.

The water is timeless forever new and eternal.
A swampy amorphous depression;
The ever flowing river of time.
The Everglades.

Image from everglades-wilderness-waterway.com