“For many years I have been encouraged by the thought: ‘You can count the seeds in an apple, but you cannot count the apples in a seed.’”— David S. Richie
Poetry is another way of scattering seeds to sprout even in the most difficult of soils. There’s no softening it—when it comes to America, the year 2025 was brutal. The cruelty of this regime in power has rocked the soul of our nation.
And yet—so many people are being brave and standing up. I take hope from the stories of goodness, like neighbors bringing food to immigrant families too afraid of ICE agents to leave their home. I’m deeply worried about the cruelty also toward the more than human world—of exploitation, ignoring environmental laws, prioritizing logging, mining, grazing over everything else, and the undoing of progress in solar, wind, electric cars, and incentives for conserving energy.
What do I do as a writer of prose and poetry? As an environmentalist? I’m finding my way like all of us. I do that best in community. I have resolve. I want to make a difference in the ways I can best contribute.
As I consider my small part in the uprising—a tide of care, tolerance, generosity, kindness, and bravery— I look for where I can both draw and share strength, comfort, and renewal. In that spirit, I will share a few poems I’ve written this month as part of Two Sylvia’s Press Advent Calendar prompts for each day of December. The poems are rough-hewn works in progress, but why hold them back while I’m still whittling? After all this is the last day of the year.
Metamorphosis
What if we awoke one morning
not from flannel sheets, not from
a stained sleeping bag under a bridge
not from gunfire, not from hunger,
not from fear of the next ICE raid
not from chainsaws tearing apart
a forest as birds fall from nests
but from a kind of chrysalis?
*
Reassembled overnight
all of us, the world freed
from the roar of cars spewing demise,
of the incessant rampant, insatiable
hunger for more as the more
than human world
blinks out until....it all stops
in a morning of grace
*
What if some of us
emerged as beavers?
Our stick dams pooling
water, renewing damaged
creeks, flooding meadows
in gifts for salmon, kingfishers,
and sandhill cranes?
*
What if others stretched
their new bird wings, butterfly
wings, dragonfly wings,
beetle wings, and bat wings
to pollinate the gasping
world in the nick of time?
—Marina Richie- 12/2025
*
Night Caper
Thirteen full moons
pearl the blue hour
of twilight coyote choir.
*
Owls are hooting oscillations,
swinging moons into a luminescent
lasso snaring the stars.
*
Coyotes race skyward,
tails swishing constellations
back into place.
*
Great-horned owls take flight,
fringed feathers soothing every
moon to oneness.
*
I blink awake in a dewy meadow
where I’ve slept, rolled
in a moon-studded blanket
*
wondering how Cassiopeia
came to land in the perfect orb
of a spider web.
- Marina Richie 12/2025
*
Reading Emily before her 195th Birthday
When Emily Dickinson held Hope in her lap,
she stroked a feathered bird, perhaps a stunned
Junco that struck a glass window or escaped
a prowling cat. So tiny the bird cupped in her hands
resting on her simple cotton frock where she sat
by a fire, warming the shivering bird with glassy
black eyes, a dark hood, and tail feathers when
spread a flash of white-black-white piano keys.
Whispering, she kept repeating the words
Hope hope hope...the thing with feathers
Even as the bird stirred, tiny heart the meter
of the poem she would write after walking
outside, her hands held as if in prayer, opening
them gently with palms outstretched, feeling
the light scratch of toes on the takeoff, the flutter
of feathers, wings beating as Junco flew away
as her words would fly through time repeated
again and again, comforting every rough torn edge.
- Marina Richie, 12/2025
*
This last poem I wrote this morning in response to a prompt to choose the 14 last words from the first 14 lines from a poem and then use the words in my 14 lines. I ‘ve italicized where they appear. I selected “Honoring,” by Joy Harjo.
New Year’s Resolve
Creased by snow, frozen plants hunker low
while we pile our plates with greens from Mexico
So lovingly, the snowflakes flecked every doomed bud.
Lilacs that held out their arms to receive a Spring kiss
just last week in December. Is this our fate?
A whip of extreme weather lashing, drawing blood.
How long can we turn our backs? The reaper is cruelest
to the innocent. If only the ponderosas outside our window
could money the air in a new green currency
residing in the safest bank –half of Earth protected
as E.O. Wilson called for, rising from his knees in field clothes
after studying another train of ants living communally.
We open the door. Step into the dark to the single hoot
of a lone owl. Blink. Gather our strength. No time to spare.
- Marina Richie 12/2025
Thank you all for the many gifts you give to those around you—and for those who are yet to be born. We are many. We are like the apple and the seeds. Happy New Year.
Note: you can read a few more poems on my website (marinarichie.com): Solstice Poetry For the Light.
Thanks for sharing your beautiful writing.
Wow. Powerful and beautiful poems Marina. Thank you.