Love in Winter by Laura Craner

Your expectations are brisk,
Like December’s chill as it sneaks under the door.
Your needs are persistent,
Like a child’s breath on wintry windows, which
Creeps and spreads like nighttime secrets:
Whispered wishes freezing
Molecules, and moments, into memories.

Your words, like snowflakes in tree branches;

Your thoughts, like snowdrifts, cloud my eyes:

Encroaching, enfolding, encasing, enclosing.

Like the first blanket of winter, you
Transform my heart’s topography.
Glistening on worn out things while
Masking and obscuring autumnal death,
You make cold feel like warmth.
Death and sleep are sometimes not so different.

________________________________________________
Laura Hilton Craner is a single mother of four who occasionally moonlights as a writer and poet. Her essays, reviews, blog posts, and stories have appeared in Dialogue: a Journal of Mormon Thought, Segullah, and A Motley Vision, where she occasionally moonlights as a contributor.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons by an unnamed Virginia State park interpreter.

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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.

The Diet Coke by Laura Hilton Craner

She was feeling vaguely seditious so she bought the Diet Coke. Any other night she would have gone with a Sprite, but tonight, Jen bought the Diet Coke.

Rebellion, huh? This is a new phase, she thought.

“May in Utah–an homage” by Laura Craner

The poplar’s shadow on her hand
Indicates a tree in spring.
Willets, catbirds, and broncos all hear
Big-hipped nature dancing across the Rockies
Stripping and putting on the many faces of
A weather-beaten land:
Green, red, brown, and white,
The flag of summer on the horizon.

They are indivisible incompatibles,
This landscape and
The mutterings of a middle woman.
Her words lie naked in a field,
Lost in the grazing cows,
Being licked up and slobbered on
By their wide, warm tongues,

Always emphasizing individuality
And difference and commonality and similarity,
Exploring, teaching, imposing,

Crying, €œLook at me!
Learn from me!
Listen! €

The weather-beaten woman
Tanned, freckled, and dry,

Green, red, brown, and white €”
With wrinkles round her many-faced smile €”
Observes her fleeting springtime
And is always living tenderly.

____________________________________________________________

Laura is a mommy and sometimes writer who dabbles in gardening and the expressive arts.   She says of this poem, “Back when I was in college I wrote a poem about spring in Utah as an homage to May Swenson. It’s a mash-up of titles of her work and bits of her prose and I thought it might be a good fit for Love of Nature month at WIZ.”   You can read more of her stuff at A Motley Vision or Depressed (But Not Unhappy) Mormon Mommy. She is very excited for spring.