Poem of the Week | October 10, 2016

This week, we are proud to offer a new poem by Michael Nelson. Nelson lives in the Flint Hills of Kansas and in Möcklehult, Sweden. He has been published in The Foothills Review, The James White Review, Tiferet Journal, and other print and online publications. Nelson has taught poetry appreciation programs in the Johnson County, Kansas public library system.
 
Author’s note:

After my partner and I were struck by lightning on the Appalachian Trail on my birthday, chaos unleashed its fury in our lives. We undertook a project of cleaning out an abandoned stone home, which helped rebuild purpose and meaning in our frazzled psyches. We shoveled wheel-barrels of scat, snake skins six feet long, dead flickers, and the remnants of a pioneer life. We cooked our meals over fire built from unsalvageable beams and ate under the old oaks. Listening to the coyote choruses, the barred owls defending their territory, and the lament of the screech owl, we slowly entered another way of understanding what it meant to be alive. Riding our battered pickup back to our temporary home, we could feel how we had entered a mythic sphere where the primal pushed us into communion with the nature spirits. Some of them were not so nice, but ultimately this direct connection with nature pulled us into the pulsing world of poetry with its dangers and splendor. Poetry also became a channel for making sense out of chaos. My manuscript Spider Lightning is the result of trying to rebuild bridges in the brain that had been blown up. Poetry can, as the green man, bring us into the world reborn.