June 21, 2024

New poem and a Loess Hills walk

Hello again! Intermittent dispatches are all I seem capable of these days. Right now most of my spare energy is going into home improvement projects (we moved last month.) So my creative writing submissions have dropped off lately. But another poem from the last batch came out recently in Stone Circle Review — thanks to them for publishing it! It’s called “Other Lives.” Check it out, maybe, and then take a look at their other recent poems.

I thought fellow writers might appreciate hearing the life cycle of this poem. Early this year, I found it in an old notebook, dating it to at least 5-6 years ago, possibly the result of a 10-minute writing exercise with a prompt from my friend Eben Bein (read his stuff here!) I checked my documents folder — I had never typed it up. So I did that, edited it a bit in the process, and then sent it out along with a few other poems. Despite a few years in deep freeze, it saw the light of day.

Back in the Loess Hills with Rohan

It had been a while since I’d visited Hitchcock Nature Center across the river in Iowa. I brought Rohan along in the hiking backpack, which he fits perfectly in now (and the added weight is a good workout for me.)

The Loess Hills landscape as seen from the Badger Ridge trail is as dynamic as ever. A couple new trees have burned down — not sure if that would have been a lightning strike or already-dead trees finished off from the controlled burns that have opened up the canopy and encouraged lots of new growth in the wildflowers and grasses below. Part of the trail along Badger Ridge has been diverted to a lower part of the slope (to avoid erosion?) and the current path is getting enclosed on both sides by jungle-like summer outgrowths of sumac, long grasses, and all sorts of other things. (Tick count: 0. It had rained the day before, maybe that helped.)

This was my first time walking across some of the more recently added parts of the park to the south, which includes a lake and some large fields that were once hayfields. They already have become impressively diverse with wildflowers, and host dozens of Dickcissels and other nesting grassland birds.

On our way back to the visitor center through the former hayfields, we were surrounded by singing grassland birds in a way that I probably haven’t experienced since my master’s field work in 2016-2018. Of course, it doesn’t come through in a photo how full of life these fields are, but songs from Dickcissels, Common Yellowthroats, meadowlarks, Field Sparrows and more rang out from ever direction. The forests up on the ridge were full of Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Eastern Towhees, and Indigo Buntings — one of them, a bright blue male, hopped right on the trail between us and another dad with a kid in a backpack. While there is no bad time of year to look for birds, it has to be said that this is a very, very good time.

Rohan had plenty to look at from the backpack. He can do a pretty good Mourning Dove impression, actually.

That’s a lot of goldenrod in the foreground. Check back in a few weeks for an explosion of yellow from hither all the way to thither.

Hitchcock is still one of my favorite spots of all time, and continues to surprise me every time I visit.