CHESTER, Vt. – Bring a poem to read at the third of the Stone Village Poetry Experience’s celebrations of National Poetry Month on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22.
This celebration will take place on Chester’s recently opened Brookside Trail, which crosses Lover’s Lane Brook behind the Academy Building and wends its way along a mile-long circle up the hillside through the forest. Coming together to share poems, participants can experience what Lucille Clifton refers to as “the mystery that surely is present/as the underside of a leaf/turning to stare at you quietly/from your hand.”
Those who would like to jointly celebrate Earth Day and Poetry Month are invited to bring “poems of the Earth” to read aloud as the group wends its way along the trail, stopping periodically to listen to another poem or two. Those who prefer not to walk the trail can meet at the bridge and listen to the first round of readings.
Poems will vary, and may include nature-related works by Vermont poets like Syd Lea—who opened the Stone Village Poetry Experience’s celebrations with a reading at the Town Hall earlier this month—and another former poet laureate, Ellen Bryant Voigt, or other renowned poets who wrote about nature, ranging from William Wordsworth to Sylvia Plath, to name a few.
In coming together to read these poems, participants will be honoring Earth Day, which was initiated in 1970 by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson; National Poetry Month, which was created in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets; and Chester’s Brookside Trail, which was commissioned by the selectboard several years ago and opened last fall.
The Earth Day celebration will begin at the Brookside Trail bridge on Saturday, April 22, at 3 p.m.
In case of rain, the readings will take place at the Unitarian Universalist Church at 211 North Street in the Stone Village, beginning at 3:15 p.m.
For more information, contact Tuck Wunderle at tuckerman@terrigenous.com.