2 minute read
Field Notes: Poetry Inspired by Nature
By David Starkey, Founding Director of Santa Barbara City College’s Creative Writing Program, and Elaine Alarcon, Writer and Garden Member
Elaine Alarcon has graduate degrees in creative writing and 20th century literature from the University of Denver, has published in various little magazines, and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. “In Santa Barbara Botanical Garden” was written when Elaine and her husband were walking in the Garden. She says, “I was taken with how quiet and lovely the meadow was, and how huge the boulders were lining the path, so pre-historic in their seeming, dwarfing humans. Then I came upon the sequoia stump and as I was reading its lifelines, an ant was crawling over them, voyaging.”
In Santa Barbara Botanical Garden
In the botanical garden orange poppies blaze through the meadow and peace enters my feet, then slips into my bloodstream flowing upward to the sun.
There are no words for this absolution, no words for blessing.
I am votive to wind, to bird calls in the canyons, to the cactus flowers in whose yellow cups tipsy insects tumble among their pistils, and to the giant boulders strewn under the oaks, Samurai guarding the path.
And to the lost ant crawling over the labeled rings of a halved sequoia trunk — a sapling in 1150 — then crossing its rings to the Magna Carta in 1215, searching fruitlessly for its kind in 1542 when Juan Carrillo explored the Channel Islands, the ant inching forward to the Declaration of Independence and rings tightly yoked by violence together — death by drought in 2000.
Unaware of its long rite of passage across eons, the pilgrim finally disappears over the edge of the trunk into shadows and the leafy beatitude of home.
— Elaine Alarcon
