Congratulations to Angel Gardner who is Seattle’s new Youth Poet Laureate this year and a belated recognition to Leija Farr who was last year’s winner! Leija Farr was recognized for the poem submitted last year to the Seattle Green Spaces Coalition’s poetry contest of 2014/2015. Her poem about nature appears below:
By:Leija Farr
Title:Nature’s Breathing Lessons
I am a container of future blooms.
Dig deep into my rib-cage to find the seasons. They come from my chest cavity, a stabbed coloring book that leaks crayons and thoughts of a child.
I smile like personified sunflowers that dance in the arms of the sun-rays. I have the mind of sap gluing these images together. The branches, the grass, the blackberry bush.
The soil that puts perfume to bare feet, we sit here, admiring Mother Nature greeting our fingernails. Sinking in the mist of a forest filled with moss and memories. A wind holding pinky promises, swimming in a once blank canvas colored to fit the land of trees.
I smelled the conception of the flowers and awaited its birth holding my breath. Here to reveal the flowers, the ones we collect in handfuls then rub against the white walls of our home.
Walking into the elements of what only exists in their dreams. Building spinal cords for those who have fallen. The purest vice you have ever consumed, it is here, the tree trunks, the whispering waters, the stems. An umbilical cord I have never known attaches me to it, abdomen to abdomen, giving me nature when the world was too much to stomach.
For I hold a soul still trying to be colored, pick up the brushes in the spring. Color the rest of my flesh. Give me daisies and lavender and tattoo it in my lips
Nature is my art form, I give it odes and P.S’s,
it made me remember how to breathe.