Wordsmithing: Outdoor poetry series continues

Wordsmithing

By Nature

The following poem continues a series featuring area writers who celebrate the outdoors with poetry. The series debuted in Outdoors on Aug. 31, organized and introduced by Tod Marshal, Washington’s poet laureate.

Riverbed

By Nance Van Winckel

I could not resist it.

It could not endure me.

Had my treks along its edge

not hung so hard to the last

and best of its damp,

I might have slipped out

through a warm red mud—

same as I’d come in.

Nance Van Winckel is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently “Our Foreigner,” winner of the Pacific Coast Poetry Series Prize.

Larch Needles Dancing

Author’s title: “Gold Larch Needles Are Dancing In A Cold October Wind”

By Terry Lawhead

Gold larch needles are dancing in a cold October wind.

The river runs low and clear over white boulders

Dropped by ice thousands of years past.

Everyone is hard at work elsewhere,

Ducks float on the water here.

I could walk to Yukon and be better off for the hardships

Than succeeding at any goal.

A window in a small room in the mansion of my heart has opened.

Terry Lawhead works in community and economic development for rural Washington; he was a logger, rancher, farmer and farrier.