If you take a walk through Ingham County’s Tollgate Drain Wetlands, you’ll see new signs displaying poetry inspired by the nature preserve.
Lansing Poet Laureate Ruelaine Stokes used a $50,000 fellowship from the Academy of American Poets to sponsor a contest for the poems.
The winners who wrote submissions on the theme “We Are Water” will be honored at an event this weekend. The free Poetry on the Pathway celebration will take place Sunday from 3-5 p.m. at Urban Beat in Old Town Lansing.
The “We Are Water” poetry contest drew 241 entries, a panel of judges chose six as winning submissions without knowing who wrote them.
Stokes didn’t judge the poems herself but is happy about about who ended up as the winners.
“Five are under 30, and those five are women. And then we have a little bit older man whom I’ve known for a long time," she said.
"But five of the winners I’ve never met before. And that’s exciting to me because it means the poetry community is much wider than I realized.”
Stokes praises what she describes as the richness of detail about nature and water in all of the six honored works.
“They really bring Tollgate to life,” she said.
One of those winners is Jasmine Snow, a journalism student working on a master's degree at Michigan State University. Dana Hardy, a second-year music education student at MSU, was also chosen. They've shared their poems with WKAR:
Ducks
Jasmine C. Snow
The ducks do not care that we are here,
nor do the leaves trickling from the cacophony of trees.
That jay in the thicket keeps his distance; the squirrels will flow about
like a current around a stone.
Still, I see the offerings we have made:
walnuts on a fence post,
the refuge of bridges over rivulets,
a new railing where its ancestors have rotted away.
But what are these tributes for?
Evidence that we happened, once? Evidence that we had been here?
What is a poem to a pond?
Love, I think.
We cannot help ourselves.
We are a recycling kind. We like to fix what we break;
we like to return things better than we found them.
These ponds are proof that we cared enough to start early, tucked away in a cityscape,
waiting for the winds to take its mists and fill all big and little bodies on this Earth.
Even the algae, and the red lily pads, and the cottonwoods, and the willows.
Even the spider, who may spin memory aesthetics on benchbacks.
Even the ant, who may call this sign home.
Even the ducks.
This Is Not a Park
Dana Hardy
I am not a jewel-encrusted beach. Not a lunch that stays down. Not the clear lake you swim in.
I am not baby soft grass for you to walk through.
But I’ll offer a bench. A bridge.
A path through my many weeds.
A place to be human, or something close to one.
When a woman walks by with her baby and asks you if he’s asleep, smile.
Shake your head. He’s not.
Close your eyes and swallow your own spit
and remember that to be human is to breathe and begin again.
You are the network of rivers that colors your cheeks
after a stormy cry. You are your liver, your kidneys,
all parts whispering to and cleansing one another.
And when they try to uproot your rough hair
and build bridges over the dip of your chin,
know how to shake your head
and hold fast to what is given to you:
spotted leaves and shallow water.
(All good homes to the right denizens.)
Be the steward of this beautiful life:
the shining white waters, the good, the bad,
and that which you have yet to clean.
UPCOMING ARTS EVENTS
The MSU Department of Theatre presents “Recorded in Front of a Live Studio Audience” in collaboration with WKAR and the MSU School of Journalism in WKAR-TV Studio A at 7:30 p.m. March 26-28 and 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 29.
Saxophonist Branford Marsalis joins the Jackson Symphony to perform works including music from the film “Catch Me If You Can” Saturday, March 28 at 7:30 p.m. at the Potter Center in Jackson. WKAR’s Jamie Paisley will conduct a pre-concert talk with Marsalis at 6:30 p.m.
