We Are Wanderers
Local poet Hannah Elizabeth King, who I featured here in my Poetry of Belonging post back in August, has just released her debut book.
I had the pleasure of hearing her read at a coffee shop last week and picking up the neatly-tied stack of books I had pre-ordered, all but one of which will soon be mailed away to friends and family, tucked in with dried flowers and bottles of mead and jars of honey. The last one I have been leafing through, making notes in the margins, experiencing and appreciating Hannah’s way of seeing and being.
Literary reviewers will call it a journey from daughterhood to motherhood, a memoir in poetry, the evolution of a poet, a love affair with nature in verse. It is all of those things, certainly.
But I am not a literary reviewer. I am a human being seeking to become rooted in place, to be fully present on Earth, to help sow the seeds of an ecological spirituality. What I see in Hannah’s poems is someone who, in times of pain and grief and illness and uncertainty, looks neither to an almighty god of scripture nor to the promise of science nor into the bleakness of an assumed void, but rather to swallowtails and hummingbirds, sweet peas and queen anne’s lace, barred owl calls beneath full moons, the feeling of body pressed against Earth, sensuous immersion in water, in winds, in sunlight. And what she finds there is not merely solace but companionship, relationship, belonging, rootedness.
This mirrors my own experience, and yet it is also complementary. My own writings and ponderings can drift toward the cerebral. I seek to understand, to describe, to resist the urge to control or maintain order. Hannah’s poems are full of emotion and surrender. My heart is moved by the weaving of the pattern, the forces and flows and cycles that underlie and connect our experience, reflecting on the bittersweetness of time and change. Hannah’s writings reflect presence, in this moment, right here with this person and this tree and this gray squirrel gathering nuts. I suppose I am describing masculine and feminine aspects. I have both within me, but sometimes my feminine needs reawakening, and for that reason I expect We Are Wanderers to remain open for quite some time, collecting notes and thoughts and musings.
Hannah’s writings are not literary creations or reflections on a theme, borne of sitting down to write about something. They are expressions of innermost being, a heart spilling in poetry. To share them with the world as she has is an immense act of courage and vulnerability. I hope that this gift will be repaid, that her poems will spread far and wide and begin to help others to reawaken to the living world of which we are a part, to put down roots, to belong on Earth. We Are Wanderers deserves to sell a million copies.
If I have convinced you that you need one of your own, or that you need to send one to all of your friends, you can purchase them directly from Hannah. You can also buy them from the usual place-that-has-all-the-stuff, but buying direct gives you a limited edition and all of the dollars stay with the author.
Two of my favorite poems from We Are Wanderers, shared with permission:
A hummingbird drinks
from dangling purple
comfrey blooms and flits
over to the azaleas,
while the tiger swallowtail
lands on a sun-drenched leaf
of Indian plum and stays a while.
Bees hum somewhere within
trumpet cups of rhododendrons,
pink flowers fall
like skirts to the ground.
The squirrel does what it does,
scratching and jumping distances
along branches of redwoods,
a robin lands on a perch
of the pea trellis
with a nut in its mouth.
All of these do what they do
and I wonder--
what is it
that we do?
What We Do
What if we made a place
within a place that exists,
in the cool of riverside green
and heat of summer fields,
where we walked and talked
and worked and loved
to birdsong and howling winds,
slept under star-strewn sky
and woke to low morning fog
stepping out of bed bare toed
onto dew-damp grass--
what if we ate slow-growing food
knowing names of every seed
of every bean and grain
set to plate before us,
flowers filling vases
spilling every spectrum hue
and we could see and taste
and touch and know
the very minutes that it takes
to make a life and to be alive--
what if we shared it all,
inviting loved ones and strangers,
creating spaces, making homes
and neighbors with those who want to be
part of a greater family,
fostering care for handmade labor,
ceramics and paints,
florals and vegetables,
heart-filled speech in word and rhyme,
poetry spoken and lyrics tuned to
instrumental accompaniments
strummed in strings and pounded keys--
what if we lived our years
learning how to be full and free,
striving for the riches of meaning
and joy in simplicity,
making history--
what if we taught others
how to do it too--
what if we made this place
within a place that exists?
Heaven On Earth