Renata Golden’s essay collection Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment launches 15 March 2024 from CSU Press with UGA Press. Renata’s work was in anthologies including Dawn Songs; First and Wildest: The Gila at 100; and When Birds Are Near. Her essays were published in River Teeth, About Place Journal, Creative Nonfiction/True Story, Terrain.org, WLA, and Chautauqua Institution. They received five Pushcart Prize nominations and Best of the Web, and were finalists for the River Teeth Nonfiction Contest, Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, and Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Award.

How I Spend My New Summers

I watch pyrocumulous clouds rise from the ridgeline
and shut my windows to save myself from the smoke.
Daily operational updates on Facebook keep me informed
of progress made by the fire and the fire crews but not
of the deer and the elk and the rattlesnakes and
especially not of high elevation birds during nesting season.

Rivers of robins
stream past in late October
Nowhere left to go

Author’s note: This haibun was originally published in an anthology titled Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration, edited by J. Drew Lanham and Jamie K. Reaser in January 2023.

Brigid’s Lament

1.
My sisters and I lie
on our bathing-suit backs with legs outstretched,
newly mown grass stickered to the backs of our knees

All-powerful we watch clouds
span the sun; we twist our bodies
till our legs crisscross

like a three-spiraled triskele,
ancient Irish symbol
of earth-water-sky, past-present-future

The cool lanes in the community pool
fire thoughts of the new school year
far into a future beyond our imagining.

2.
Brigid born at sunrise, a sudden tower of flame
from copper-red mane to blazing sun
like warm wind through girls’ hearts

The goddess and her sisters
the original trinity igniting
transformation of all that matters

Her spark of illumination,
the glow on the night’s horizon
sullied by smoke blown in from a distance

Brigid’s sacred need-fire
like a flame on dry grass
like a flame that provokes the wildest of fires.

3.
Teach me the caoineadh for our loss
and I will keen for our ancestors and inheritors
of the scorched earth we leave, a future beyond our imagining.

Grandmother Moon

The darkness of Samhain, where nature begins,
where life is first dreamed. When winter solstice stops me
like the sun in dreamtime minding its turning point.
When Grandmother Moon is praised by great birds
who bring light to the night, an old brightness thrown down
for hundreds of years. The blench of the breeze
off Coonanna Harbour scatters silences
under my grandmother’s moon
shadow.