by Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens

It was in San Rafael, in a tiny subterranean artist studio with walls of thickly plastered brick that I made my acquaintance with New Zealand’s huia bird, meeting it in my friend Lorna’s intricate twig sculptures and an altered artist’s book whose pages had been painstakingly excised, erased, and inked with images of haunting delicacy. I learned how the bills of males and females (his squat cudgel for shredding bark, her curved needle for finding insects) had evolved so as to make them mutually dependent mates-for-life. I also learned that the huia had recently become utterly, unalterably extinct, so that not only would I never see it with my own eyes, but neither would my children, nor my children’s children, nor their children and so on and on down the long, bitter corridors of never.

As Lorna showed me photos of what now remains of this remarkable creature–stuffed specimens, Victorian hats and brooches fashioned with plumes and beaks–I felt a terrible sadness. But I also marveled at how Lorna had managed through her art to recall the bird in a way that its relics, stored in their musty museum cases, could not. Instead of evoking the sorrow and revulsion we feel when we see dead things, her work conjured the huia alive, singing, and in flight. What I saw was less imprint-left-on-sand by a passing wave than a reincarnation of the wave that had passed, more like Roethke’s I think a bird, and it begins to fly. More like Keats’s nightingale as symbol of the power of art to dismantle the dread machinery of death. It was a powerful moment, because I was still in mourning for a childhood paradise lost to the coal mining and railroading industries in the mountains of western Pennsylvania and was becoming increasingly concerned about the serpent in the garden here in California, the golden state of my adopted home.

Within hours of leaving the studio I’d written “Last Bison Gone” and emailed it to Lorna, who responded with a drawing (Huia Feather) that inspired me to write another poem (“After”). And then we were off, sharing poems and art and in the process giving each other new ideas. Poem led to image and back to poem, and over the next two years we wrote, drew and painted in a fever of creativity communicated in more than 2500 emails and many meetings with papers spread across my dining room table. Our collaboration became all-consuming at times (just ask our husbands and kids), but it felt like a personal revetment against the grim news of ecological setbacks like the Gulf Oil Spill and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. At some point, we took a breath and found ourselves with a pile of poems and images based on nature and the environment. A very large pile. When my husband paged through it, he asked, “What are you going to call your book?”

Our Book? We hadn’t set out to make a book. But then, there it was, nearly 100 pages nurtured in a rare, luxurious welter of creativity with no thought given to whether or how it would be published. That part came later, sometimes making us yearn for the days when all thought and energy were for the next poem and image. But we were fortunate to find a press willing to take on the project of printing four-color images as well as poems, and in the end we had God, Seed: Poetry and Art About the Environment, the book from which the following excerpts are drawn. Our hope was for a book that would echo the seasonal cycle, emulating in its small way what nature, against all odds, accomplishes again and again: recovery, renewal, resurrection of life from death and blight. That, and perhaps also the hope that we can learn from our love of this world how to take better care of it.

It is with this hope for poetry-inspired tikkun olam that we share some of our poems and drawings with you all on Tikkun Daily — we have included a selection of nine poems and illustrations below.

Notes and Acknowledgments

God, Seed. The reference is to the Native American agrarian practice of planting seeds in mounds and using fish heads as fertilizer to renew the soil.

Lakemont Park and Cricket at Play. An amusement park in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Lakemont Park still operates “Leap the Dips,” the oldest freestanding wooden roller coaster in the United States. Cricket at Play depicts a cricket in motion, using watercolor and lipstick fingerprints to dress the cricket in party clothes of grass and blossoms.

Raystown River Trout and Trout. The italicized words are from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Fish,” and “mystery” and “glitter” recall Mary Oliver’s poem by the same name. An example of the traditional Japanese art of fish printing, this gyotaku print was achieved after trial and error that involved the artist visiting fishermen on the banks of Phoenix Lake in search of a whole specimen and in the end stuffing, sewing, and freezing a gutted fish.

Day. On August 27, 2007, Native American poet Sherwin Bitsui and nonfiction writer and third-generation Oregon rancher William Kittredge read at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, where Kittredge told a story about a rancher shooting magpies and using pesticides that devastated bird populations in lands once roamed by Native Americans.

Last Bison Gone. The huia bird, once a flourishing population in New Zealand, is now extinct. Huia mated for life, and the male and female of the species were adapted so as to make them reliant upon each other in order to eat; male huia had short, tough beaks for shredding bark while the females had long, curved beaks for extracting insects. Herds of wild bison are dwindling today. The prehistoric cave drawings of bison discovered on the walls of the caves in Lascaux, France, are in danger of extinction from lichens and other

organisms proliferating since the caves were opened to visitors in the 1950s.

Seeds of the Giant Sequoia and Pine Cone. Fire plays a role in the life cycles of many forests, for example, by preparing a seedbed and promoting seed germination. See Bruce M. Kilgore, Naturalist 23(1): 26-37 (1972).

Perennial. This plein air watercolor of perennial blossoms, made while the artist was on a picnic with friends in Minnesota, captures the essence of spontaneity. After making many subsequent versions in her studio, the artist decided to return to her first draft.

The following media were used to create the art in this book: Dandelion, watercolor, Cricket at Play, watercolor and print; Persimmon, watercolor; Trout, print; Sighted, pencil and watercolor; Herd, ink; Pine Cone, watercolor; Garden, watercolor.

Grateful Acknowledgment is made to Tebot Bach who published the book, God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World (2010) and also to the following journals in which these poems and images first appeared: The Atlanta Review, Knock Journal, The Sand Hill Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review, and The West Marin Review.

God, Seed may be ordered from Small Press Distribution, Book Passage, and Tebot Bach. A portion of the royalties is donated to the David Brower Center in Berkeley, California, home to organizations working for environmental and social justice.

Lorna and Becky will read from God, Seed on 4/7/11,7:00 pm, at Books, Inc. at 2275 Market Street in San Francisco and on 4/8/11, 6:00-8:00 pm, at the Marin Arts Council Gallery at 906 Fourth Street in San Rafael, CA.