How to Sew Yourself Into the Earth

a poem from my new book

How to Sew Yourself Into the Earth

In the shade of
a live oak,

lie on your back 
with arms 

outstretched, 
let spider silk 

spool around thighs
& hips, held by 

a ground-hugging 
colony of wild

strawberry, sending 
runners to loop 

limbs & weave you in
a cocoon of

velvet tendrils 
& white flowers.

Photo by Spencer DeMera on Unsplash

a little bit of news

I am happy to announce that my new book of poems, Every Note, a Lantern, is now available for purchase from Kelsay Books and Amazon.

Many thanks to fellow poets and friends for believing in these poems and giving their blessings.

These are quiet, observant poems—explorations of doubt, promise, worry, grief, and unexpected hope that arrives in ordinary things—the whiskers of a little wolf, the blur of a ruby-throated hummingbird, a chorus of frogs, the feathered antennae of a giant leopard moth. Praise for these gentle poems that find beauty in the brokenness, find prayer in the bird bath, and find shelter in the weeping cherry tree.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of All the Honey and host of The Poetic Path

Mary Katherine Creel’s poems emanate the kind of quiet wisdom and close attention most poets can only dream about. Every note here is indeed a lantern, and when read aloud, the poems become “tiny embers lighting this ancient cave, the body.” The precision with which she brings the world to life turns this striking collection into a field guide for being human, for holding life in both grief and helpless wonder. Here, you will find the living things that keep us company on the Earth—fiddler crabs, chipping sparrows, milkweed, and bees—reminding us that to name the world is to feel more at home in it, to find its boundless sources of solace and light.

—James Crews, editor of The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace & Renewal

Every Note, A Lantern is lit with resonant imagery. In these highly crafted and gorgeous poems, which are full of movement and natural wonder, Creel invites us to see how nature is the perfect place to confront our grief, and also find promise and hope. We “marvel at / the elegance of swifts / as they drop, one by one, / into the mouth of / a stone tower.” We find promise in the resilience of the wintering kinglets, the Carolina wren, the nighthawks as they “make chase / in the dim half-light.” And in looking outward we are also examining the human interior, intimate and complex as the dark center of a sunflower. Wow—there is beauty everywhere that you look in this book!

—Christopher Salerno, author of The Man Grave

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Thanks also to Kelsay Books for giving these poems a home. And to my friend Jim Morgan for granting permission to use his artwork, Line Trail Gap #17, on the cover.