How I found poetry through my parents’ connection to nature

Early on, my parents opened me to nature’s sensorial world. They delighted in the changing seasons—through decorative plantings in the yard, the sprawling vegetable-and-herb patch on the easement, backyard birdwatching, the face of the sky in a mountain lake, and sojourns to the country and botanical gardens.

They handed me the beauty of verse in childhood, so its rhythms came to me as readily as heartbeats. Mom fed her five children a steady diet of nursery rhymes and literary classics. I remember clapping to simple verses or turning the pages as she read aloud from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Part of a generation taught to commit verse to memory, she recited lines from William Shakespeare, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Robert Frost—lingering over words that painted daffodil seas, summer yielding to a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” or the gold of “nature’s first green.”

Dad, who grew up in the north Georgia hamlets of Talking Rock and Ludville, absorbed poetry through ballads and songs passed along by family. He sang—in off-key renditions—tunes like “Barbara Allen,” “The Streets of Laredo,” and “Danny Boy,” transporting us to yesteryear places far from our Birmingham, Alabama, suburb.

The Irish “Danny Boy” is particularly poignant, the call of its pipes “from glen to glen, and down the mountainside” easily transplanting to the Appalachian landscape. This tale is universal—whether loved ones are separated by situations, distances, emotional chasms, or death. The images speak to a connectedness between human beings that transcends space and time, as do all poetic lines that bring solace and joy to “life’s brief sum” (Horace).

Losing my parents precipitated my return to poetry. Writing memories into reflections, and later into verse, allowed me to work through bouts of depression and sorrow, and to embrace the therapeutic value of creative expression.

What poems connect you to nature or memories of loves ones?