DAILY PHOTO: Bee on a Flower

Taken in the summer of 2011 near Toccoa Falls

DAILY PHOTO: Snake in a Creek

Taken at the Reynolds Nature Preserve in Morrow, Georgia in July of 2012

DAILY PHOTO: Golden Foliage

Taken in the autumn of 2011 at Lake Lanier

DAILY PHOTO: Muscovy Duck, Struttin’ and Primpin’

Taken at General Coffee State Park in the Autumn of 2011

POEM: Decomposing the Sun

a mushroom cap

mango and red, burnished

rises from the forest floor

decomposition painted into a setting sun

what a masterpiece nature makes of rotting gunk

DAILY PHOTO: Owl

Taken at Callaway Gardens in the Autumn of 2012

POEM: Animal Observations

 sitting on a stone

-grassless

-hopless

and you call yourself a grasshopper!

 

I know I shouldn’t, but I anthropomorphize.

I can’t see this orangutan without hearing the words,

“Ya borin’ me!”

play in my mind

 

parents lunged to cover impressionable eyes,

but someday they will be adults

who wonder about the mechanics

of how baby giraffes get made

 

Dear Flamingos,

Stop hiding your heads.

It freaks out the tourists,

making them think there is a pile of heads in some other corner of the Zoo.

DAILY PHOTO: Candid Monkey Portraits, Lopburi

Taken in October of 2012 in Lopburi

DAILY PHOTO: Rural Northern Thailand

Taken in October of 2012 in the countryside near Chiang Mai

POEM: Overstory

that’s my forest
— deep and dark —

but, yet, I see cracks of azure dome
through the canopy gaps,

and when it undulates
competing species wave together —

tousled by the same hand
so, even though each sways at its own rate,

it looks like one gasping organism