NATURE Poem: Love Letter, by Ashley DeMar

There is magic in being of a place.

A home for rootedness,
and for returning.

My home is the coffee ground leftovers of an ancient glacial lake.
Where fossils become skipping stones
and skipping stones becomes summers.

And enough
stacked between sugar cake autumns
and heady lilac springs
laying dormant
under lake effected winters
become entire lifetimes.

And I could spend mine
slow sipping from backyard fountainheads,
waiting until that special kind of twilight moment for the Waterfowl Flyover,
listening to their great ancestral song.
Calling me back again and again
to my home waters.

The way the night smells sweet,
inviting all the heat of the day to rise from thirsty ground and rest in her boundless starry
arms.
Or when it is cold,
snow-angeled looking up
and how the falling makes you feel like flying.
Nothing but sky and snow and the silent sound it all makes.
My home is great lakes
waters lapping at the doorsteps of the people who guide me,
who shape me.

My home –
this great northern country
who taught me
to love and honor Nature
for the absolute force that She is.
With seasons that crash and demand us sit back and watch –
whether we had other plans or not.

Oh, how I love the hidden waterfalls
and fantasy greens,
the magnificent seaways
and the lakes that feel like oceans.

How from the Ontario bottom
to the very Adirondack tip top of my heart,

I am of this place.

And it carries me,
no matter where I go.