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Thursday, March 14, 2024

The Eternal News of Early June

 In memory of Dale Hoyt *

Come, my friend, just one last time 

and walk me down a Garden path 

reliving a ramble in early June 


when once again a hummingbird house 

is wound in silk and saliva. Describe 

how it’s layered with lichens and leaves 


then show where it hides 

high in a white oak 

cloaked in a canvas of green. 


Come weave a tale of hungry toads 

hunting the musty leaf-littered dampness 

under the air-dance of damselflies. 


Then mimic the trill of a Leopard frog 

and the plucked glunk of its Green cousin 

calling from a froggy shore. 


Now talk me through the gruesome fate 

of zombie bugs riddled with fungus 

clinging to leaf-tip graves. 


Speak of the hidden lives in soil – 

of thousand-gendered mycelia 

and subterranean slime-mold sex. 


Then show me the home of chanterelles 

where gold funnels grow 

on a green moss floor.


Bring on the air of an early summer 

bounding through a boyhood day 

recalling the ways of wonder 


and watch me shed my decades 

like the sloughed skin of an aging snake 

baking in the noonday sun.


Come the twist of eternity 

let us idle outside the gates of heaven 

to drift in the peace of a warm summer breeze.



* Over many years, Dale led the Nature Ramblers at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia. He kept a detailed record on his award-winning Nature Rambling blog site. My poem describes a ramble on June 11, 2015. Here is a link to Dale's blog post for that week: 

https://naturerambling.blogspot.com/2015/06/ramble-report-june-11-2015.html


Dale Hoyt teaching at a ramble



Ruby throated hummingbird on nest
Image by Don Hunter

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