Jane Satterfield

Why I Don’t Write Nature Poems

Volume 14:4, Fall 2013
Prose Poem Issue

Why I Dont Write Nature Poems

Because Im always wearing the wrong shoes, I rarely stray from the path. Theres recollect, theres tranquility and the way the trains punctuate each hour, shrill the shaken fields.  Lets bide a bit here, thinking why we love themthe tracks, the transit, a trains a metaphor for so many things in life.  Like me, too busy eyeing up the buffet from the back of the line to consider a phalanx of phlox, the tabby stray cavorting in the hedge.  I dont see a cow meadow as any kind of invocation.  Am drawn to the satellite dish disrupting the view.  To the one swatch of sky where the haze hangs.  Because, truly, the one time I tried, the saddled mare extended an answer. The hoof on my foot a fine form. Because the genius of the place can drop a scroll of sycamore bark at my feet and I still cant translate his tongue.  Slow study. What happens in the ditch, the dun. Because a cicadas buzz in the topmost branch is all the intel left to get, trilling, a telling:  here, here, I am here.


Jane Satterfield is the author of three books of poems: Her Familiars (Elixir Press, 2013), Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir Press Book Award, 2003), and Shepherdess with an Automatic (Towson University Prize for Literature, Washington Writers' Publishing House, 2000), as well as Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (Demeter Press, 2009). Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, the Mslexia Women's Poetry Prize, and the 49th Parallel Poetry Prize from the Bellingham Review.