Joy
It stalks me, knows
where I am, follows me now,
can see me, a wolf at the edge
of the pine forest watching as I run
through panes of light,
against the air that whispers
through the trees, that wants
to lift me up like a sail.
Nothing scares me more
than being unhinged
but when a dove lands before me
I stop short, caught breathless,
breaking open, torn from the trough
of despair I feel so safe in. No choice
but to rise, and I am stretched out,
devoured, expanding into the trees, this bird,
no I, only we, untethered to me
and inside of everything
mortal and earthbound.
Heather Swan‘s poems have appeared in such journals as Terrain, Minding Nature, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, Midwestern Gothic and Cold Mountain. She is the author of the poetry collection A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), a finalist for the ASLE Book Award, and the chapbook The Edge of Damage ( Parallel Press), which won the Wisconsin Chapbook Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in Aeon, Belt, Catapult, Edge Effects, Emergence, ISLE, Minding Nature, and The Learned Pig. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing in Madison at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Amethyst Review 