Sense of Place

I've been reflecting quite a bit since yesterday's discussion involving the topic of our sense of place and a place that defines us. I mentioned Florence, Italy as mine but as the place that is culmination of all the places that define me. As a poet, numerous places can define me, who I am but also where I will have a sense of myself and my history with it. It could be the Dayton Art Institute where my passion for art and art history has been nurtured from a brush stroke or in my old high school (Room 240, my creative writing teacher's room) where my writing took root almost ten years ago. Countless places have entries in my mind's historic preservation registry but there will be one that stands out as my link to my home town and represents the foundation of my pre-poetic world. In Beavercreek, we have a place known as the Beavercreek wetlands and it's been a place that has kept a significant importance in my soul since the first day I visited it about two decades ago. to me it is the presentation of Beavercreek's past and holding onto the natural beauty it had before developers transformed its landscape. (sidenote: to the city's great pride, we finally have beavers taking up residence within beavercreek.......something which for most of my life hasn't happened) The artist within me always finds itself being summoned their every season to document the subtle changes be it a new tree, a new family of cranes, mallards or like two years ago beavers and even a slight expansion of the wetland property. The Wetlands is a preserved living and growing part of the city which I feel as long as it is still in existence, my sense of place for this city will remain fully intact, but when the day comes and the final sun rises blankets its residence, I will lose a fragment of my connection and history with Beavercreek but that fragment will remain preserved in the years of photographs and poems that were caught and crafted within its boarders.

Tracks in the Snow

 Published in The Road: A Collection of Poetry

A snowy haze coats the marshlands before me,

No prints nor plants scatter the wooden boardwalk beyond my feet

Dried out cattails languish in frigid wind

Plumes of feathery seeds cling in abeyance to sepia tip,

Stalks creak in colliding snowfall

As one after another flakes pelt the brittle fern green husk.

Jays flit from naked branches

Azure down becomes speckled with white

Screeching once, then twice its voice echoes

Through the desolate marsh like voices before

The closing hours of summer dusk.

Bone-chilling breeze howls across the frozen river,

The horizon blurs in a snowflake mirage

As the subtle scent of fireplace dreams tickle my nose

Chimney smoke bellows from a lone cottage

Tucked away in an alcove of my mind

Where crackling imaginary hickory logs lull me to sleep.