McMammoth

By Richard King Perkins II
Huntley, Illinois, USA

This is a clone
in the shape of a woolly mammoth.
For her, Siberia isn’t a punishment
but a falsely promised land of permafrost.
Her tusks forage and dig
on the taiga
with measured sadness
as the great slope of her back
offers a momentary ramp,
a tool for climbing humans
to ascend and ride atop her head.
And once you control the head,
you own the rest.
And like our ancestors,
someone will decide
after the elephant ride
that she looks absolutely delicious.

THE MOMENT

By Regina (Gina) Piroska
Tasmania, Australia

Exhaling, I hear the sound of my breath as I lean into the rising hush.  A breeze plays with a bit of puffy down, picks it up, twirling, a vortex along a dusty pathway.  A swallow circles the white bit of fluff that whirls this way, then that

until finally, in a suspended split-second, the bird snatches the fluff, flying quickly under the eaves of the deserted bank building

and deposits it into the newly-made nest.

small town
the second-hand shop sign
says ‘cash only’

2025 – Edited from a published version 2022 
(Modern Haiku (print edition) – editor Roberta Beary)

Seagulls

By Regina (Gina) Piroska
Tasmania, Australia

seagulls gather
on the abandoned trawler
a drifting cloud

Published Echidna Tracks #15 

PTSD and Psalms

Katy Z. Allen
Wayland, Massachusetts

Yah is at my right hand, I shall not falter.

Maltreatment, disregard, cruelty,
abuse, defilement, contamination
do not go unnoticed,
by the corporeal or the incorporeal,
whether inflicted upon
an individual or a people,
a species or an ecosystem,
an atmosphere or a planet.

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.

Aftereffects
aftershocks
continue
for years, decades, generations,
millennia.

Truth springs up from the Earth; justice looks down from heaven.

As an individual,
I have lived the impact.
Among too many peoples,
I have seen the devastation.

I call to You, my Rock, do not disregard us.

Regarding countless species
I have witnessed disappearance.
For ecosystems large and small,
I have mourned their loss.

Deep calls to deep.

With the Earth and the air
I have felt the trauma
in my lungs
               and in my bones
in my cells
              and in my vessels
in my heart
                            and in my soul.

Hear my prayer, O LORD, and let my outcry come to You.

Psalms cited: 16:8, 130:1, 85:12, 28:1, 47:2, 39:13

Complexity

By Katy Z. Allen
Wayland, Massachusetts

sitting by a stream
enveloped in subtle autumn beauty
feeling solid ground beneath
breathing invisible life-giving air
awareness awakens

verdant summertime leaves
conceal yellows and oranges
reds
maroons
and complexity beyond measure

introduced species small and large
exotic flora and fauna
suppress more delicate autochthones
of many hues
small and large
and complexity beyond measure

death, demolition and destruction
hide and inflame
grief and fear
despair
desolation
and complexity beyond measure

rising seas and rampaging wildfires
screaming winds and persistent drought
overshadow and obliterate connection
to earthy soil and solid rock
iron core of earth
and complexity beyond measure

sitting by a stream
watching beloved children at play

quietly
unexpectedly
touching grief
beyond words
   beyond comprehension
      beyond endurance

that simmers steadily

in the silent static
and active living
earth

in expansive and tortured
human realms

and in the deepest
most hidden
most vulnerable
recesses of the soul

complexity beyond measure

One October Morning

By Katy Z. Allen
Wayland, Massachusetts

One October morning, 
the Merlin app on my phone
heard
only a single dark-eyed Junco.
Nothing else.

My ears
heard
cars and trucks on the road beside my house,
distant heavy machinery, clanging and banging,
and a chainsaw
not far off.
No birds.

My imagination
heard
the trills and chatter of the woodland edge
during the dawn course of spring–
cedar waxings, red wing blackbirds,
yellowthroats, rose-breasted grosbeaks,
and more.
So many birds.

My imagination
heard
the silence of the woods and meadows
punctuated only by the murmuring wind in the trees,
bird calls,
animals scuttering in the litter
and water tumbling in a rushing creek.
Nothing more.

My heart
heard
the single Junco aching for the absent birds
and filled the space around it
with varied and myriad passerines
from my memory and my imagination.

May they not all
disappear.

The Gardens of Antarctica

By Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan

The gardens of Antarctica breathe free. Free of the hideous white. A dense green silence remembers the blinking ice. Dewdrops heavy as stones hung about the neck. The overpowering poetry of tears.

summer
the millstone
ginding
the donkey

First published in Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole, publication date November 3, 2025, Cyberwit.com.

Tide Ledger

By David Anson Lee
Bellaire, Texas, United States

We keep a ledger of small losses: one slipper at the pier, two gull nests, ten breaths of air no one thought to save. The ledger rides in the pocket of a coat that remembers salt: buttons looped with a child’s braid, a coin pressed thin as a fossil.

Once a year we walk the shoreline and record what the tide returns: a plastic comb, a glass bead, a photograph of a town no longer printed on any map. We bury each entry in a jar and plant a willow above it.

The willow grows as though sounding the names aloud.

Dispatch from the Thinning

By David Anson Lee
Bellaire, Texas, United States

They said our town still had a forest, though it clung to the highway like a frayed sleeve. At dawn the trucks came, counting trunks the way bankers count coins, and left behind a geometry of stumps the birds could not decipher. The library taped a notice to its glass: “Community Meeting. Seeds Needed.” Women arrived with seed packets folded like blessings. Children wrote tree names on scraps of paper, as if naming could mend the thinning air. We planted where runoff carved salt into the soil and hoped the roots could read our intentions.

dawn over drainage:
someone scatters sunflower seed
as if feeding stars

Building a Birdhouse

Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan

That stuff is for the birds, the builder says, when I point out the loss of shade where the trees would be. He is coming from a power lunch with the architect, a former tightrope walker in his father’s circus. Seems like there was a discussion about an extension to the go-kart track. Noise pollution, apparently. What about electric karts, I say, and an aviary just before the final turn? Fat chance, he says. That little hole in front, beneath the red-peaked roof, is too small for the kid’s albatross.

First published in Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole, publication date November 3, 2025, Cyberwit.com.

Atlas of Small Things

By David Anson Lee
Bellaire, Texas, United States

When the last map burned,
we traced new roads from thumbprints:
salt in the seams,
a country stitched by small hands.

A child learns the coast
by listening for gulls;
an older woman counts orchards
the way she once counted prayers.

Every mouth carries a river’s memory:
names of fish, the taste of rain.
We lift the globe like a bowl,
tilt it until teaspoons of light
slide into the cracked places
and teach the wounds
how to flower.

Depravation Darlings

By Colin James
Massachusetts

The acronym B.L.A.H.
written on the clubhouse door,
because legends are human.
I will follow you anywhere
suitably hydrated, then demobbed
in the Arizona desert.
Behold The Cave Of Reason,
much better than a dusty clubhouse
and your mother’s provincial sandwiches.
The sunsets here are dramatic,
my headaches and carpal tunnel
softly pressed between cactus flowers.

radioactive soil

By Vidya Premkumar
Kerala, India

barely open –
the sunflowers
on radioactive soil

October Showers

By: Regina (Gina) Piroska
Turners Beach, Tasmania, Australia

october showers
a blackbird tugs at the worm
stretching
we prepare to join the group 
at a yoga retreat

Published catchment edition 4 2025

Magpie

By: Regina (Gina) Piroska
Turners Beach, Tasmania, Australia

the magpie
postures on a sheep’s back
in tall wheat grass
the discarded red remains
of a rusted-out plough

Published catchment edition 4 2025

A cloud of blackbirds

By Melissa Dennison
Bradford, Yorkshire, England

I am standing with my pen poised to record but it’s so quiet and still. It’s often like this, a waiting game. The wait is becoming longer and longer. I am taking part in a citizen science project to document blackbird sightings. Climate change can seem like an abstraction or something that effects people a long way off, on the other side of the world, but it’s not, it’s right here on our doorstep. 

in the trees
only the sound
of the wind

Much-loved songbird threatened by mosquito-borne virus | BTO
Mosquito-borne killer disease threatens blackbirds – BBC News
Blackbirds in Gardens | BTO

Incantations

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, NC, USA

forests
burning far away
I bow
to the wood thrush
singing orisons unseen

I follow a path along the brook, through mountain laurel and rhododendron. The stone hut stands half-hidden among the trees, its roof green with moss. Thick, curved walls enclose an oval of coolness in the summer heat. Elliptical windows admit a little light.  As my eyes adjust, I notice a message chalked on the sloping ceiling:

maybe 
the world isn’t dying . . . 
maybe 
she’s heavy 
with child

*Note: The second tanka is a ‘found poem.’
~From my book Earthbound: Tanka-Prose & Haibun, 2022

Just This

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, NC, USA

I used to think
it would last forever—
the swallows
coming home each year,
the green hills blossoming

on my path
one pure white feather
I carry with me
news of a dying planet,
a widening war

the bridge
across the creek—
I cannot see
the barred owl 
calling from the other side

a water strider
dimples the surface,
an otter 
rises and vanishes . . .
the stream flows on

spring beauties bloom
among tiny handprints
in the mud
I kneel on the bank
of the passing moment

~First published as the Afterword to A Worn Chest by Joy McCall & Tom Clausen, 2022

  Reprinted in my book The Wind Harp: Tanka Pentads, 2023

The Least of These

By Jenny Ward Angyal
Gibsonville, NC, USA

Hokusai painted them, Issa wrote about them, and Mao did his best to exterminate them. 

It’s true that Eurasian tree sparrows gorge themselves on spilled grain.  So, during the Great Leap Forward, the Four Pests Campaign encouraged schoolchildren to kill as many sparrows as they could, tearing up nests and smashing eggs. People beat pots and gongs to drive them from their roosts until the birds dropped from exhaustion.  A billion sparrows died. With few birds left to eat them, hungry locusts swarmed through grain fields and rice paddies. Upwards of forty million people starved. 

gazing 
into Pandora’s box—
nothing left
but a tattered feather
and a mirror full of cracks

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign