What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In Ecopoetry Now, invited poets highlight poetry’s integral role in sustaining our ecological imagination. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the author and an excerpt from their essay.
G. C. Waldrep
(draft 1)

It is not insistent. It is not desperately clinging
                                              to the is, the are.
              It is familiar with the dusk.
(I write, “It is familiar with the dusk,” words.)
     It does not call
                   Do you believe, do you believe.
I don’t know how much like a church it is
                                                                     but the sun,
the sun if it knows worship clearly knows this,
                           it reaches with its chasm
      towards the soft muscular throat, thinking
                           Inside. There must be
an inside. It repeats this. Epochs chamber by.
I was stunned by the sheer scholarship of it.
        As well, the sound milk makes, or a sound
                                          milk might make.
Come away then, from the incision.
                                                             The wind
shot through the fence post like a knot of silk.
It is directly related to light, to the Pauline
                                                        mission of light.
        Perhaps it is a preaching to the bees.
Scalded, pressing forward at the top of the wall,
          what does your soul say now,
                                              warden. Scars break
                                                                       beautifully
                in the early hours, you must be
awake to catch their fragments as they descend.
            Some ashes of bees, kept reverently.
       Little bits of Chopin on loan from adversity.
Memories of livestock filling the streets,
        archive them
                     together with the bandages. What?
Yes, the new ones as well as the soiled ones.
And then: to bleed light, as if it were a key.
                  Wound wound wound wound!
      The wonder of it, almost but not quite a lock.
                                         But it sounds better
               than Hölderlin Hölderlin Hölderlin!
which is perhaps the more accurate translation.



(draft 2)

                                                      Let’s
    memorize the darkness together, you & I.
from the book THE OPENING RITUAL / Tupelo Press
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Cover image of G. C. Waldrep's book, The Opening Ritual
What Sparks Poetry:
G. C. Waldrep on Ecopoetry Now 

"For me as a poet there’s a joy in sheer description, as there is also an excitement in the act of address... Description is always an act of translation. And in so doing propose, to some notional reader, that something could be shared. To address, meaning to conjure that notional reader (or auditor) explicitly, via deixis: you. You there. Not you, but you. You, defined as whatever or whomever the poem is addressing. Sometimes I think 'you' is the most complicated word in the English language. 'You' is always a revelation to me."
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Danielle Badra leading a poetry workshop in a Fairfax Park while county Poet Laureate
The Legacy of Fairfax County's Poet Laureate

"Danielle Badra wanted to create something that would last well past her time as poet laureate of Fairfax County....She worked with ArtsFairfax and the Fairfax County Park Authority to create two plaques, one at Riverbend Park and another at Ellanor C. Lawrence Park. Each placard has a poem selected by Badra. There is also a QR code that anyone can use to submit their creative writing, poetry, and illustrations to ArtsFairfax’s ongoing 'Poetry in the Parks' digital collection."

viaFAIRFAX COUNTY TIMES
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