Emergence Magazine

Artwork by Eric William Carroll

Butterfly

by Linda Hogan

Poet

Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw novelist, essayist, poet, and environmentalist. She is author of Mean Spirit, winner of the Oklahoma Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest book of essays, The Radiant Lives of Animals, won the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Award.

Artist

Eric William Carroll is an Asheville-based artist who works at the intersection of science, nature, and photography. His photographs and installations have been shown at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Aperture Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and Pier 24 Photography, among others.

 

In the strong earth fragrance

I am part of the tree,

held against it. Brother, Sister,

we came from the cellular division,

its math already figured

many thousands of years

in the beginning,

in the far distance

of the journey,

the fragrance of leaves,

the taste of dew.

 

I was part of the tree, feeling

the leaves so heavy with

that morning damp,

awaiting the spectacle of sunset,

the evening blue, that vision of night.

 

Long ago, intruders

forced us to cross this land to the Black Prairie,

where glow worms shine all night

part of the magic of their life.

We traveled the ledge above a river

to the Long House village.

We are the clan of crossings

and the young transformed themselves,

opened their silk, crossed into full,

wing life to fly with all others

at once indigo blue, cerulean, their beauty

leaving us behind to watch,

knowing we crossed time

into the swarm of trees.

This generation; it is time to hunger,

each life still and watching the young

take again to our ways.

We look back and look forward,

remember the beginning.

We remember the milk of stars,

and drink the light.

Read More from Vol. 5: Time

Our first hardcover edition, Volume 5: Time explores the vast mystery of Time. Separated from the fabric of the cosmos, Time has been distilled into a tool of control. But what kind of Time listens and moves in tune with the Earth; travels not in a straight line, but in a circle? Journeying through its many landscapes—deep time, geological time, kinship time, ancestral time, and sacramental time—this volume asks: If we can recognize a different kind of Time, can we come to dwell within it?

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