Today I visited the ForestSong exhibition at Arts & Culture El Dorado’s Switchboard Gallery – forest and wildfire-inspired art and poetry, drawing on local events like the Arts + Nature Festival at Wakamatsu Farm in early June. I was happy to find my “prayer flag” poems as part of the exhibition. Here’s one:
Prayer Flag
This morning a mourning dove was calling,
live oaks moving with the rhythm of a breeze,
dappling dead cut stubble underfoot.
This place – like all our places now – in peril.
This place of Nature’s healing.
I think of the black bear crossing the road
from honey hive to chaparral,
the sphinx moth with its unanswerable questions,
columbine blooming in shady corners
among stone, the gloaming that gathers
a day’s pangs and agonizings,
its disintegrations and re-makings,
our darkness and our light.
~ Taylor Graham
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