By Shari Wagner
Indiana Poet Laureate 2016-2017
For my artist residency at Limberlost State Historic Site, I led three poetry workshops with writing activities designed to help participants explore the beauty, history, and ecological importance of the Limberlost, as well as its connection to Gene Stratton-Porter. Now that this Arts in the parks and Historic Sites project has come to completion, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the site staff and Friends of the Limberlost who have been so much a part of its success. I am also deeply appreciative of the people who attended the workshops. They came from all over the state, as far away as New Harmony. If you scroll down this blog site, you will find some of their individual and collaborative poems.
Not only did I enjoy my Limberlost events, I had a great time preparing for them. This involved becoming acquainted with the Loblolly trails and Limberlost Cabin, reading all of Gene Stratton-Porter's poetry, and thinking about what prompts, models and activities might best inspire workshop participants. One particularly nice surprise was discovering that Gene was greatly influenced by one of my own favorite poets -Walt Whitman.
Throughout my activities, I kept recalling the first book I read by Gene---her novel, Freckles. I was about ten years old, and what struck me most in the book was Freckle's "cathedral," a particular place in the Limberlost that became his special sanctuary. After reading that book, I went in search of my own Wells County cathedral and found it in the remotest section of my family's ten-acre woods. A fallen tree trunk served as my pew. Oak and honey locust formed the columns. When I was lonely, this room in nature offered solace and communion.
Not long after I found my cathedral, I began exploring the creek near my home--Griffin Ditch, a waterway that flows between fields and empties into the Wabash. I discovered many intriguing places along the creek's wooded route, including a tiny oxbow pond with an island (a fragile spot that disappeared in dry spells), an old apple orchard with fairy circles in the grass, and even a heap of discarded furniture almost hidden in thistle and raspberry vines. My psalm to Griffin Ditch titled "Creek-Song" appears in The Harmonist at Nightfall (Bottom Dog Press, 2013), a book that grew from my desire to find sacred places throughout Indiana---special touchstones for the spirit. For this poetry project, I revisited several places from my childhood, but mostly I made pilgrimages to new places, especially to state parks, nature preserves and historic sites. My impetus for this project came from many sources, but surely one was Freckle's cathedral.
This past September, on the morning of my last workshop at the Limberlost, I left the motel feeling disheartened by the news of mounting tensions between North Korea and the United States. But when I arrived at the Loblolly Preserve, I was immediately consoled by a scene of enchantment--immersed in a prairie fresh with fog and dew, where it felt like the first dawn on earth, with every good thing possible. It was a magnificent sanctuary that I tried my best to memorize and to write about in the poem that follows. I think we all need these places that we return to, either physically or through memory, places that connect us to a reality larger than human concerns.
Morning Forecast
At the Clock Tower Motel
I'm eating cereal with CNN
on the screen: breaking
news of tremors
in North Korea--a small
earthquake or the testing
of a nuclear bomb.
Twitter accounts escalate.
*
Thirty minutes later, pulsing
cricket and cicada song
engulfs me. I'm on foot
in the Limberlost, where
forest was hacked, wetland
drained, prairie tilled
for crops. Now acre by
tender acre, the uprooted
are returning. Fog and
dew cling to seven-foot
bluestem grass. Above my head,
eastern sun illumines
each beaded filament
of a web, one of the true
wonders of the world,
this world, handing me
her huge bouquet
of partridge pea and tickseed,
rattlesnake master and
wild purple asters.
Dawn will succumb
to the forecast: late September's
ninety-plus heat. But I
keep in a locket this
memento of Eden
where roots reach deeper
than the height of a man
and clutch earth,
for better, for worse,
through drought and fire.
Photographs by Shari Wagner taken at the Loblolly Marsh.