A Poet Who Is a Kindred Spirit

at least in this regard:

What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use

by Ada Limon

All these great barns out here in the outskirts,

black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.

They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.

You say they look like arks after the sea’s

dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,

and I think of that walk in the valley where

J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,

No. I believe in this connection we all have

to nature, to each other, to the universe.

And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,

low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,

and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,

woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.

So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,

its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name

though we knew they were really just clouds—

disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.

To the Woods -- Its People and a Bird

On this day, the woods people and the woodpecker became powerful teachers.

The people -- an elderly bed-ridden woman, her middle-aged daughter, her thirty-something daughter, and her three children (one of whom is a miracle four-year-old who was not expected to survive birth) -- reside literally in the woods, down a rocky private drive littered with rusted cars and discarded detritus best suited to junk yards. At the end are three inventive self-created homes with imaginative use of found materials and almost entirely self-sufficient (generators for electricity and car reflectors in the sun for the nights the generators fail, wood-burning stoves for heat, a spring water collector, an old school bus for storage. Their creativity and determination are large, but not as large as their love of family, determination, and cheer. In the larger world, others might see them as impverished; in my eyes they're rich.

As rich and as determined and hard-working as the woodpecker I stalked in my yard late this afternoon, camera in hand. His bold trill, determined pecking and boring into each stump, and brilliant red head and the woodswomen's natural beauty lifted my spirit.Who's the luckiest person on the edge of the woods? That's easy: me.