Art on the Trails is a unique celebration of art in nature and poetry that takes place at the Elaine & Philip Beals Preserve in Southborough, Massachusetts each year, and this will be the ten year anniversary of this event. In the first phase, art is selected by an art judge who announces the 16 winning works for installation along the nature trail, and then in the second phase, two poems are selected by a poetry judge and the artist to go along with each work of art. You can read about the poetry process here. I responded in verse to four of these works of art along the trail this year and submitted them for chapbook publication. I’ll share my poem that is selected to appear in the chapbook on the scheduled day of the event finale on Sunday, September 13. I will be unable to be there in person to read my poem at the progressive walk, but I have shared a video recording with event organizers and will share that here as well. Today, I’m sharing the tanka I wrote in response to Mike Libby’s work Here and There and Now and Then as part of the 2026 Art on the Trails: Time in the Landscape.
Patricia Franz, our host today for the second day of the August 2026 Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com, lives with her husband and her Bernese Mountain dog, splitting her time between the Arizona desert and California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. She continues the nature theme in our poetry prompts today. Like yesterday’s host Denise Krebs, she has two poems in Picture Perfect Poetry: An Anthology of Ekphrastic Nature Poetry for Students, the inspiration for yesterday’s and today’s prompts. You can find more of her poetry at www.patriciajfranz.com.
You can hop over to the site to read the exact prompt and see the pictures, but Patricia inspires us to write a nature poem today with this story: Two years ago, she snapped a photo of a mama bear. Over the course of a few days, she had begun to forage closer and closer to Patricia’s house. Then one morning as dawn broke, she awoke to find her and her two cubs rummaging through the kitchen! She wondered what the bear would say if it could speak, inspiring writers to consider various perspective and viewpoints as we write our poems today.
My mind tumbled for a while over these possibilities, and I almost always go to the kitchen table and all the spiritual ancestors who surely still lurk in moments allowed by Heaven. But we’d recently had something happen that offered a different perspective too. In the late summer evenings, the sun hits the kitchen wall with an orange glow, beckoning us out to the back porch to gaze in awe at its glorious swan dive beneath the trees on the far back side of the farm. We hadn’t anticipated the tangerine glow one evening last week after all the afternoon storms, but sure enough – it appeared, and we stepped out to take it all in. After a few moments, I noticed the hummingbird feeder needed refilling, so I grabbed the nectar and gave it a pour. Then we wondered about the feeders out front, so we went to check those too.
As I was unhooking a feeder, my husband whispered, “Come look at this.” A double rainbow stretched from the north side of the farm all the way across the south side. The hummers would have to wait – – I put it all down and ran for my phone to take photos! By the time I returned, the top bow had dissolved, but I managed to capture a photo of the full stretch of the bottom bow. Every time I think about rainbows, I think about Noah and the Great Flood. There are two trees left in the front yard after the harvesting of timber in 2025, and they struck me like Noah and his wife looking out over the land after the floodwaters dissipated. That’s what inspired today’s poem. I chose a nonet form, which begins with 9 syllables and decreases by one syllable on each line.
