There are poems that evolve in ways you cannot predict. This poem, is actually a draft of the first poem I wrote this year and seems so little like the poem I started with. What’s amazing to me is that this poem about gestures lacks much of the personal loving detail of the original. I … More Gestures
This past summer I drove through Montana. As a Pennsylvanian I experience the dry prairie and open space with a combination of awe and grief. And sometimes I found an object of human occupation or activity to wonder about. “Red Barn” Wheat grass and thickspikesprout at the red barn’s gnarled corners.Sun queens cluster and conspireignoring … More Red Barn
Where I’ve lived most of my life, the landscape provides a sense of making sense. “The Ridge, the Fen, and the Barren” Walk the ridge’s line, shod or unshod.Traverse it and stand on the scree field transect.See the fen and the barren. The fen in a bowl with ridges round,the hips of Tussey and Thickhead,primeval … More The Ridge, the Fen, and the Barren
Several years ago I took a class full of graduate students outside. It was a philosophy of education seminar. We had read a few chapters from The Development Dictionary edited by Wolfgang Sachs and What Are People For? by Wendell Berry. Something in those chapters triggered a deep desire in me to take people into their attention. … More The wonder of the ordinary: “A Pile of Bricks”
A couple of months ago, I stood on the bank of a small lake in western Pennsylvania as night descended. Across the lake was a heron. She stood still in the brown waters beneath a steep bank surrounded by an antumbra of fireflies. I watched her for some time, wondering about her as a creature … More A Poem About Herons
Kestrels are tiny falcons who live across a fair portion of the eastern United States. You can see them gliding on the wind over ridges and streaking through trees. Their diminutive size, blue-grey crests, bars on the chests, and incredible agility mark them. A few years ago one darted across a forest road on Sand … More Kestrel
I live near a pond where dragonflies play all summer. The most gorgeous of them to my eyes are pondhawks. “Pondhawk” Emerald frond clingssix spindle legs onthe tall grass chutefour laced wavering wings. I waitwatching leopard frog’s eyesblown glass bulbs likebubbles at the surfaceamid marsh grass high. Pondhawkstanding, its compound eyes stalkterritory for foodexisting for … More “Pondhawk”
I invite you to reflect. That is all. To look at your face on the rippling water’s surface, touch that surface and its image, see yourself in this world and the world behind and around that surface, and wonder about it. Wonder at it. All of it. That sense of being one and many is … More Peter is in the Forest
Peter Walks for Democracy 