Welcome, everyone, to Tuesday’s Poetics. I’m Dora (Dreams from a Pilgrimage), today’s dVerse pubtender and fellow traveler on this planet we call Earth, where the evil few spill the blood of many for power and profit. In some places the holocaust of the land and people is almost complete. In others, the bloodletting is just beginning. Yet others, horror continues unremittingly. These landscapes, be it in the city or field, have become or will be unrecognizable, burnt husks of what they once were, buried in rubble, soaked in the blood of the innocent and helpless, spreading farther and farther.

We cannot yet fathom the horror and trauma being endured by the living in these regions, though their landscapes bear testament to them. The desolation, loss, and death are absorbed into the very fabric of their being, into their bodies, into minds trying to make sense of the senseless.

The landscape becomes internalized, either as mirroring or amplifying what is felt or endured bodily.

If this introduction is unsettling to you, I apologize. It is difficult to write as if when one part of humanity is enduring the unendurable, the other remains unaffected. Do we not belong to each other?

In an idyllic time, when the tremors of the French revolution had become more muted in England, it was the landscape surrounding the ruins of Tintern Abbey along the Welsh border that William Wordsworth internalized to such an extent that he imbued it with a preternatural quality.

William Wordsworth, excerpt from Tintern Abbey

To know who you are, you have to have a place to come from.

Carson McCullers

Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney is one for whom his native Irish landscape is ever near and dear, so much so that many have commented on the earthiness of his poetry. His poem “Undine” is a good example insofar as the landscape becomes personified, literally embodying this “orphaned memory” of “watching a man clearing out an old spongy growth from a drain between two fields” (Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-78, 1980, p. 53). [An undine (UN-deen) is a water-nymph or sprite. When undines marry humans, it shortens their lives on Earth, but earns them an immortal human soul.]

from Door into the Dark (1969)

Description is revelation

Seamus Heaney

In Kwame Dawes’ Nebraska: Poems (2019), each of his poems seem in some way to embody the landscape of the plains, its wide, open spaces and its wintry bleakness, as he struggles with life there as a transplant from Jamaica where, though born in Ghana, he had spent his childhood and early adulthood. In “Before Winter,” he captures a moment that is impermanent. Here in this poem, he says, is “me thinking about the body and mortality . . . a moment of what it means for this particular body. That is, my own body. Thinking about weight, thinking about my ankle, thinking about these things, to walk through this alien territory. And there’s a sense in which I am alien in this space. I’m an interloper. This is not my sort of native landscape and place. And yet all the language of comfort—hibernation, the idea of change and seasonal change—has become part of my hope. And that way in which I’m embracing that, even as my body sort of is resisting that, I think becomes that kind of statement about this immigrant body, this immigrant person in this landscape” (New Yorker Poetry Podcast, February 26, 2020).

Before Winter by Kwame Dawes
I imagine there is a place of deep rest—not in the resting but after,

when the body has forgotten the weight of fatigue or of its many

betrayals—how unfair that once I thought it clever to blame my body

for the wounds in me: the ankle bulbous and aching, the heaviness

in the thigh, and the fat, the encroachment of flesh. It is hard to believe

that there are those who do not know that it is possible to let things

go, to then see the expansion of flesh—it is so easy, and that knowing

is a pathology. What is unknown to me is the clear day of rest—

I carry a brain of crushed paper, everything unfolds as if by magic,

every spot of understanding is a miracle, I cannot take any credit

for the revelations, they come and go as easily as the wind.

You must know that this is a preamble to an epiphany I will record—

the late-morning light of October, the damp soiled back yard,

the verdant green lawn, the bright elegance of leaves strewn

over it all, turning nonchalantly in the wind, and the Nebraska sky

blue as a kind of watery ease, a comfort, it is all I can say, the kind

one knows, even standing there waiting for the dog to squat;

one that I will remember for years but will never have the language

to speak of—one of those precious insignificances that we collect

and hoard. The moment lasts ten breaths, and in that silence

I imagine that I can see spirits, I can know myself, and I will not fear

the betrayals of body and love and earth, and the machinations

of self-made emperors and pontificates. It will be winter soon. I know my body

is collecting water in its nether regions, the weight of the hibernating

mammal, storing everything in drowsy, slow-moving preservation.

I mean I am losing myself to the shelter we build to beat back

sorrow and the weight of our fears. I have covered thousands of miles

in a few days, and I feel my parts flaking off, a shedding of yellow

pieces covering the turning earth, and I am helpless to this soft

disappearing that some call sleep. I will stretch out and breathe.

Do you know I don’t know how one can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it?

Fyodor Dostoevsky

In “Loneliness,” Dawes uses the elements of the alien landscape to construct a home with his words, placing his body “deep inside, where the snow is powdery, crystal under light.”

Kwame Dawes

O O O find
your poemhole plug it keep it open as you can
a broad beach laved by tides

Maureen N. McLane, from ‘Daybook’ (London Review of Books, 5 March 2026

The first Native American poet laureate of the United States, Joy Harjo, in An American Sunrise: Poems (2019), confronts the site where the Msvoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. In “Granddaughters,” as Kwame Dawes points out, “there is no line separating the natural world and her human body” (American Life in Poetry: “Granddaughters”)

Joy Harjo, “Granddaughters” (2019)

Tess Taylor in “Altogether Elsewhere” (2013) traverses east and west coast cityscapes, “rooms we lodge our bodies in,” each absorbed incompletely.

Tess Taylor (from The Forage House, 2013)

Your poetics challenge today is to incorporate a landscape or cityscape into your poetry that either mirrors or amplifies your interior landscape (or lack thereof). Be sure to use the examples above to guide you as to what I mean by “embodying a landscape.” Is there a place that’s special to you, that moves you, that has become a part of you? Perhaps you have a memory of encountering a landscape that has changed you or enlightened you? What particulars of this landscape have inspired, comforted, encouraged, strengthened you, or done just the opposite? Put it all in a poem, and take us there.

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:
* Write a poem in response to the challenge.
* Post your poem on your blog and link back to this post.
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* Read and comment on your fellow poets’ work –- there’s so much to derive from reading each other’s writing: new inspiration, new ideas, new friends. Enjoy!

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