Muriel Nelson
Muriel Nelson  

Muriel Nelson lives near Seattle where she enjoys edible organic landscaping. Her most recent poetry collections are Please Hold and Sightsinger.

Posts By This Author

Understory

by Muriel Nelson 09-30-2022
A poem.

Illustration by Maddie Fisher

It’s silly to call trees people
saying firs waving limbs are yelling at wind,
and cedars so tall their tops disappear
have heads in the clouds,

or to sympathize with plants below
ripening berries, sending out seeds
on wings while struggling for scraps of light,
and then feeding survivors of fires.

Silly. Better listen. Memorial
services have their ways of bringing up

Poetry: Saving Is a Form of Worship

by Muriel Nelson 03-02-2016
In memory of Maxine Kumin
courtesy of Jill Krementz

courtesy of Jill Krementz

           

'The Hungry Soul in Pursuit of the Full Soul'

by Muriel Nelson 08-01-2012
A poem

On Proverbs 8

My saints won’t be named by a church.
Their sainthood won’t stand as statues. Listen.
Voices
calm as cooking directions
play continually—

If any thing’s resurrectible, it’s memory:
those eyes,
song-haloed, so full of lightness
nothing could stop their flight;
not a Thomas who peers into pupils’ darkness,

not a ravenous soul left grounded.
We are born, yin-yanged, of lightning
with saints and putti the lightest of all.
But love-rumpled faces, quick limbs, and pierced hearts
are unstable, done only in clay.

Advent

by Muriel Nelson 12-01-1992

An Advent poem