Three Poems for Green Point Preserve and Kennebec Estuary Land Trust
by Mike Bove
I wrote these little poems after a visit to Green Point Preserve in early November 2020. I brought my family with me to explore; it’s a really special section of land containing a path with all the quintessential features of a coastal Maine walk— a rough-hewn foot bridge winding through a bog, rolling hills of dense spruce, and a final descent out onto the point giving way to wide views of Winnegance Bay. At one point, I stopped to let my family go ahead and found myself alone listening only to the land. It’s easy for many of us to connect deeply to the land. It’s easy for me, especially in a place like Green Point, to imagine the edges of my body dissolving into the trees, the path, the birds and their chatter, everyone who’s ever walked there since it came to be. It’s great comfort— we’re never really alone in places like these.
Mike Bove
Nov, 2020
Green Point Preserve, West Bath
Raven, nuthatch, woodpecker:
there are voices in the woods.
Other sounds, too, at the water where
seaweed waves with the tide.
If you think about it, and you do,
there’s no way to say where
your footsteps end and the land begins,
so you need to take care, the birds
remind you, take good care because
though you’re alone,
you’re not the only one here.
Walking With My Sons at Green Point
Small trees aspire upward.
Like children.
Like my boys who
walk here and touch all they can:
shawls of moss on a pine,
minty lichen blooms
on a half-buried boulder.
When they reach the point
they scramble for rock shards
and pebbles, hurling them
as far as they can into water,
competing for length.
I want to tell them to watch
the ripples that pulse outward
from each splash.
I want to give them a metaphor
for the way small choices
reach toward forever.
I don’t say anything.
They’ll know it when
they’re grown, tall
like trees, some later day
when they’re not
trying to outdo each other
in distance.
Considering the Timeline, Green Point Preserve
1.
The beginning of the timeline states
the Abenaki stewarded the region
prior to white settlement.
What if:
Beginnings are arbitrary.
The land did not require settling.
2.
Timelines are wrong to suggest
the present is a destination
we’ve arrived at.
3.
We like the way this land accepts
our footsteps.
We like the moss and spruce, the rocks
that wall the waves.
We like the way this land remembers
our children running the path,
the way it remembers us as children.
We like the parallel memories
of the Abenaki
watching their children.
4.
Everyone knows beginnings
and endings are the same.
Mike Bove’s poems have appeared recently in Rattle, The Cafe Review, and others. He is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and his first book, Big Little City, was published by Moon Pie Press in 2018. He lives in Portland, Maine with his family and teaches in the English Department at Southern Maine Community College.
Kennebec Estuary Land Trust (kennebecestuary.org) is committed to conserving land and wildlife habitat of the Lower Kennebec and Sheepscot River estuaries. They are a community based membership organization serving the towns of Arrowsic, Bath, Bowdoinham, Dresden, West Bath, Georgetown, Richmond, Westport Island and Woolwich.