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Field Notes: Poetry Inspired by Nature
By David Starkey, Founding Director of Santa Barbara City College’s Creative Writing Program
Chryss Yost served as the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara from 2013 to 2015. She was awarded the 2013 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award, and received many other honors, including multiple Pushcart Prize nominations.
Chryss is the co-editor of Gunpowder Press, where she founded the Shoreline Voices Project. Regarding her poem, “Forest Metaphorist,” Chryss says, “This poem reflects the energy, the tension of the Garden. In its own balance between cultivated and wild, the Garden helps me recalibrate my place, and my own seasons. Our earliest metaphors are gardens. It grounds me to spend time as a living thing in the company of other living things.”
Forest Metaphorist
Wild, but like wild ginger is wild:
coddled in acidic shag beneath redwoods,
flood of tender green hearts over needles.
The arrowhead leaves labeled hummingbird
sage, each stem a fuse bursting to bloom.
You. Seen beneath ceanothus, sworls
of blue-white beesound arch over
the path you follow as seasons sing
in you, too. Beloved here. Belonging.
— Chryss Yost
