DID YOU KNOW THATOrion has been around for over four decades? As part of our ongoing archives digitization project and ahead of our 45th birthday next year, we want to give you a taste from our editorial vault. We’ll have more news about this exciting project soon, but in the meantime, please enjoy these six poems – which have never been published before on our site – to explore our long legacy of exceptional environmental writing.

Earthstar

Arthur Sze

Originally Printed in Spring 1999

Opening the screen door, you find a fat spider
poised at the threshold. When I swat it,

hundreds of tiny crawling spiders burst out.
What space in the mind bursts into waves

of wriggling light? As we round a bend,
a gibbous moon burnishes lava rocks and waves.

A wild boar steps into the road, and, around
another bend, a mongoose darts across our headlights.

As spokes to a hub, the very far converges
to the very near. A row of Siberian irises

bud and bloom in the yard our bedroom opens out on.
A moth flutters against a screen and sets

off a light. I had no idea carded wool spun
into yarn could be dipped and oxidized into bliss.

Once, hunting for chanterelles in a meadow,
I flushed quail out of the brush. Now

you step on an unexpected earthstar, and it
bursts in a cloud of brown spores into June light.

The Rapture

Mary Oliver

Originally Published in Summer 1996

All summer
////I wandered the fields
/////////that were thickening
//////////////every morning,

every rainfall,
////with weeds and blossoms,
/////////with the long loops
//////////////of the shimmering, and the extravagant—

pale as flames they rose
////and fell back,
/////////replete and beautiful—
//////////////that was all there was—

and I too
////once or twice, at least,
/////////felt myself rising,
//////////////my boots

touching suddenly the tops of the weeds,
////the blue and silky air—
/////////listen,
//////////////passion did it,

called me forth,
////addled me,
/////////stripped me clean
//////////////then covered me with the cloth of happiness—

I think
////there is no other prize,
/////////only rapture the gleaming,
//////////////rapture the illogical the weightless—

whether it be for the perfect shapeliness
////of something you love—
/////////like an old German song—
//////////////or of someone—

or the dark floss of the earth itself,
////heavy and electric.
/////////At the edge of sweet sanity open
//////////////such wild, blind wings.

A Pastoral

Agha Shahid Ali

Originally Published in Spring 1996

“on the wall the dense ivy of executions”

—Zbigniew Herbert

We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
by the gates o f the Villa of Peace,
our hands blossoming into fists
till the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. Again we’ll enter
our last world, the first that vanished

in our absence from the broken city.
We’ll tear our shirts for tourniquets
and bind the open thorns, warm the ivy
into roses. Quick, by the pomegranate—
the bird will say—Humankind can bear
everything. No need to stop the ear

to stories rumored in branches: We’ll hear
our gardener’s voice, the way we did
as children, clear under trees he’d planted:
“It’s true, my death, at the mosque entrance,
in the massacre, when the Call to Prayer
opened the floodgates”—Quick, follow the silence—

“and dawn rushed into everyone’s eyes.”
Will we follow the horned lark, pry
open the back gate into the poplar groves,
go past the search post into the cemetery,
the dust still uneasy on hurried graves
with no names, like all new ones in the city?

“It’s true” (we’ll hear our gardener
again). “That bird is silent all winter.
Its voice returns in spring, a plaintive cry.
That’s when it saw the mountain falcon
rip open, in mid-air, the blue magpie,
then carry it, limp from the talons.”

Late Prayer

Jane Hirshfield

Originally Published in Autumn 1996

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby—
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

from Sabbaths 2002

Wendell Berry

Originally Published in March/April 2004

After a mild winter
the new lambs come
in a March as wet, cold,
and unforgiving as any
I remember. Night freezes
continue into April.
But the brave birds risk
a note of hope, and the bold
little wood anemones
lift their pretty blooms
into the cold above
the dead leaves. The sun
grows slowly stronger.
This Sabbath morning, I climb
again to the high woods
and sit down. Toward noon
the wind loses its edge.
Comfort comes.
I eat, and then sleep
in warmth on dry leaves
in a sheltered pocket
of the slope, the wind yet
loud beyond. I sleep
sound among young trees,
among cairns of rocks
piled up by those who cut
older trees to plant
the slope in rows. I wake
thinking of the ones who once
were here, some I knew,
others I know by stories
told and retold. I know
the hard daylong work
the once was done here:
the heat, the long enduring,
the resting and the talk
around the water jug
in shade at the row end.
Now they are gone, and I
stay on a little while,
the trees, I hope, for longer
this time than before.
I rise from the ground now
more slowly than I used to,
thinking of those farther back
I never knew even
by the story, whose names are lost,
who came by ship from places
whose names are lost.
In distance, like the trees,
the human generations
gather into a wall
nobody sees beyond.
Here where fields were
the woods are, and I come
again into the one time,
the Sabbath time, the timeless
that we pass through
and the woods grows up behind us.

From This Height

Tony Hoagland

Originally Published in Spring 1998

Cold wind comes out of the white hills
and rubs itself against the walls of the condominium
with an esophageal vowel sound,
and a loneliness creeps
into the conversation by the hot tub.

We don’t deserve pleasure
just as we don’t deserve pain,
but it’s pure sorcery the way the feathers of warm mist
keep rising from the surface of the water
to wrap themselves around a sculpted
clavicle or wrist.

It’s not just that we are on
the eighth story of the world
looking out through glass and steel
with a clarity of vision
in which imported coffee and
a knowledge of French painting
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////are combined,

but that we are atop a pyramid
of all the facts that make this possible:
the furnace that heats the water,
the truck that hauled the fuel,
the artery of highway
blasted through the mountains,

the heart attack of the previous owner,
the history of Western medicine
that failed to save him,
the successful development of tourism,
the snow white lotions that counteract the chemistry
of chlorine upon the skin—our skin.

Down inside history’s body,
the slaves are still singing in the dark;
the roads continue to be built;
the wind blows and the building grips itself
in anticipation of the next strong gust.

So an enormous act of forgetting is required
simply to kiss someone
or to open your mouth
for the fork of high-calorie paté
someone is raising to your lips.

which, considering the price,
it would be a sin
not to enjoy.