Three Poems for Burley Farm and Southeast Land Trust
by Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder
Jul, 2021
Beaver Pond
It is the end of spring,
the evenings still curving
into impossibly longer light,
and I have left the built world
for one long moment to be here.
Here in the rain I am thinking of the creatures
who brought this water to stillness
who felled the trees
and dammed the stream
to make a home in the forest.
I am thinking:
When we dam, when we fell—
we fell ourselves, we fall from grace,
we forget that this water falling from the sky
courses through our own veins.
But here where the beavers have been at work,
the light rain falls
barely audible in the trees,
and their pond folds this gentle song into its breast
with the bright silence of a return home
after a long journey.
Language in Winter
There are times when I struggle
with teaching my daughter language,
though of course this is what I am doing.
Her sounds are forming fast:
each new consonant, each vowel
as resplendent as the the northern cardinal
resting on his branch, a deep-orange sun
sinking behind the horizon of a winter ocean.
And I often rejoice.
But then there is today—
the late morning tracing gold
along the trunks of birch trees,
the soft rasping
of the beech who cling
to their leaves and sing
through dark nights, and this sense
that if I could listen with my body,
I might know more snow is coming—
I look at the plain,
unspoken wonder
on my daughter’s face
and I know my language
to have come between myself
and the self that is not mine:
the self that would, if I could allow it,
disperse into the quiet forest
like the icy breath of the cardinal.
Growing
When I first came
to these New England forests
I missed the grand sky,
the open land of the plains.
I was always trying to peek behind
the tall trees, the granite cliffs,
for a view of wide lands
that disappeared into the curve of the sky.
But we are made up of places
and the land weaves itself into us.
We wrap the seasons round, growth rings
expanding outward to meet what is there to greet us.
I stand on the edge of this field
preparing to walk into the dappled shade
of this woodland
and at last open my arms to return the embrace.
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is a writer based in northern New England. As a staff writer for Emergence Magazine, she explores the human relationship to place. Her work has been featured in Crannóg Magazine, Inhabiting the Anthropocene, and the EcoTheo Review. She is currently writing her first book.
The Southeast Land Trust (seltnh.org) conserves and stewards land for the benefit of people and nature in New Hampshire. SELT serves 52 towns and cities of Rockingham and Strafford counties and has conserved tens of thousands of acres since 1980, including nature preserves, hiking trails, farmland, and scenic vistas. SELT relies on its annual contributing members, committed Board of Directors, and talented staff and volunteers to keep advancing critical conservation initiatives in our region.