Thank you, 2012 LONNOL participants!

Wilderness Interface Zone would like to thank participants who put their hearts in our Love of Nature Nature of Love Month.   The list includes:

Elizabeth Pinborough
Kathryn Knight
Gail White
Ashley Suzanne Musick
Sarah Dunster
Chanel Earl
Sarah Dunster
Mark Penny
Laura Craner
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Jonathon Penny

You all helped WIZ celebrate love and nature with fair fond tokens of well-worded affection.   Thank you!

Thanks also go to our readers and commenters.   There’s still plenty of room open (until March 24) on our LONNOL month giveaway of Typhoon, starring Dorothy Lamour and Robert Preston.   If you’d like one, please go to that post and leave a comment.   I’ll contact you for shipping information.   WIZ offers these DVDs free to readers in appreciation for your presence here and for your support of WIZ’s mission to create a rhetorically-diverse space for Mormon nature literature (though, of course, all nature writers are welcome–see submissions guidelines here).

Also, WIZ’s 4th Annual Spring Poetry Runoff Contest and Celebration will open on the vernal equinox, March 20, with categories for both competition and non-competition, an open-invitation spring haiku chain, another Retro Review, and other revelry.   Please make a note of the Runoff’s pending arrival and watch for announcements detailing this year’s activities and prizes.

Again, deepest affection to you, contributors, and to you, readers and followers of WIZ, for your continued presence here.

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Old Lovers by Gail White

Old lovers sleep in double beds

(They do not need much space to sleep).

With curve of arm and bend of leg,

They shape themselves for dreaming deep.

Old lovers feel each other’s breath

As ships in harbor feel the tide:

A subtle current underneath

That pulls them to each other’s side.

Old lovers know their lover’s touch:

Even in sleep, the warmth is there

Lifting the mind’s unconscious latch,

Bridging the intervening air.

Old lovers wake in double beds

(Narrow, but with room for two)

And kiss with white and nodding heads,

Ready to see the white hairs through.

_____________________________________________

Gail White has edited three anthologies (including The Muse Strikes Back) and published 3 books of poetry, the latest being The Accidental Cynic. Her new chapbook,  Sonnets in a Hostile World, is available from Amazon. She writes her poems on the banks of Bayou Teche in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

Author’s note: In a love letter to Sarah Teasdale, Vachel Lindsay writes, “If we do as well at the age of sober old folks as our sober old folks, we will do as well as mortal clay can expect.  We must see the gray hairs through.  It is all a part of the game, and we must not refuse the game because it will not be all the first day of spring.” (Qtd. Margaret Haley Carpenter, Sara Teasdale: A Biography. Schulte Publishing, 1960, p. 206.)