Rising Red

Editor’s Note: Sean Prentiss recently served as poet-in-residence for Woodbury Mountain Wilderness Preserve, over 6,000 acres of forest, streams, and wetlands on a mountain in northern Vermont, protected as forever wild by Northeast Wilderness Trust. During his year as poet-in-residence, he wrote an entire poetry manuscript to the mountain and to wildness. “Rising Red” celebrates the sometimes uncelebrated red maple. – Liz Thompson

Photo © Liz Thompson

After the blankets

of white snow

have melted into

surging brooks

    but before leaf out,

    those fluttering flags

    of chlorophyll leaves

    swallowing the sun,

our mountain grows

into April’s rising red,

new leaves budding

into almost-blossom,

    anthocyanins

    pulsating within,

    later to illuminate

    dying autumn.

Today, this awoken

maple red offers the color

of sweetness, oncoming

shattering days of green

Photo © Liz Thompson

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Sean Prentiss is the author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, which won the National Outdoor Book Award, Crosscut: Poems, and Majella: Poems from a Mountain Home. He co-wrote two textbooks, Environmental and Nature Writing and Advanced Creative Nonfiction, and he is the co-editor of The Science of Story: The Brain Behind Creative Nonfiction. He is a professor at Norwich University. He and his family live on a small lake in northern Vermont.