Join us with photographer Kellē Sauer, who’s prompting us at Poetic Earth Month, to find wonder in the world—in poems and/or photos.
Once you find your photo or your poem, post it on Instagram, on your blog, or on a public Facebook post, and please share the link with us in the comment box below.
Be sure to post your submission by Friday, May 24. Kellē will be collecting a few favorites to feature next month!
L.L. Barkat says
Thanks for the inspiration, Kellē. 🙂
I’ve been finding wonder all weekend (and I hope I manage to get ’round to writing about that 🙂 ).
Also, as I photographed some of my week’s wonder, I had fun changing the angle from which I shot, to see if I could find more “life within life” just by changing perspective. Here’s one of my tries:
Dandelion in Cobalt Bowl
Richard Maxson says
Mmmmm looks like dandelion salad. I love the contrast between the blue bowl and greens.
Kelly Sauer says
What is getting me is that little undulating dance the dandelion leaves are doing back in your bokeh…
Bethany R. says
Pretty photos, Kellē and L.L. 🙂 I find it peaceful to just gaze at them.
Perhaps a little writing or may come from that. If not, I’m enjoying the fresh air here.
Kelly Sauer says
Bethany, this is why I take pictures, believe it or not, so I can sit with them and “enjoy the fresh air.” Would love words if you have them, but this comment is actually quite full for me.
lynn__ says
Fun prompt, Kelle! Hope to see more wonder 🙂 Here’s my photo/poem post:
Profusion
Kelly Sauer says
Lynn, I’m in love with
blooming
like a hedonist
With words, you gave me the tiniest detail about the bloom that paints a personality and opens a whole world to me. It’s a cheeky bloom, a daring bloom – I WANT TO BE THAT BLOOM.
Thank you so much for sharing!
(Also, your droplets? I can just picture this flower dancing with your words, and spinning them into motion as she goes!)
L.L. Barkat says
A different kind of wonder…
Adirondack Chair in Light ‘n Shadow
Kelly Sauer says
LL, I would have shot this light without the chair, but having the chair in it, the bit of it, imposing itself powerfully into the perfect setting of the light, changes the narrative of the light. I see you stopping to wonder at the transformation of the angle, how it both softens and sharpens the jutting shape. I see the shadow of the chair pointing you back up into the light.
It’s an interesting image. I’m glad you included it here, wondering what it’s making YOU wonder.
Richard Maxson says
One more, please. I liked this so much I had it enlarged and framed for my office. This hooded crane would come to the field behind my house every morning in Land O’ Lakes, Florida. It would stand for 10-15 minutes and look around. I didn’t want to scare it, so I took the photo through the screen on the porch. This and the morning light inadvertently gave it the subdued look. The matting on the framed photo is a double mat, with the innermost one a thin line the color of the crane’s hood.
I always saw it as a framed photo you might see in the drawing room of an old Victorian mansion.
Hooded Crane Victorian
L.L. Barkat says
Oh, Rick. I really love this. So serene.
Kelly Sauer says
Rick, the sense of this image is wonderful. I can feel you holding your breath as you pressed the shutter, sense the pause of the bird in its motion. It’s a very powerful image, one to make you stop in your tracks and remember to breathe.
Richard Maxson says
I see the first photos didn’t come through.
These are from Starkey Wilderness, one of my favorite hikes when I lived in central Florida.
Dragonfly
Falcon on Blue
Same falcon as above. I captioned it “Are you the wave form of the wind, or the wind itself?”
Falcon Flight
Ma and Pa Peregrine
Sunrise in Pleasant Valley (real name) Arkansas
From my back deck in Eureka Springs Arkansas after a rain. The bird photo bombed me.
lynn says
Lovely shot of the dragonfly…so delicate. I think the bird definitely enhanced your “after the rain” photo 🙂
Kelly Sauer says
Those skyscapes are going to make me cry. One of the things I miss most about my home in Charleston was the ever-changing sky affected by the constant shifting of the weather fronts and the sea breezes there. Here in Fresno where I live now, the sky seems always the same (unless the weather is “not normal”), so we have weeks on end without clouds or anything to filter the light and make things interesting. Well seen, my friend, these shapes and light and color.
Richard Maxson says
Dragonfly
Here is a poem I wrote for the tiny dragonfly above:
What the Shadows Made
Here in the library of the trees, a lounge,
a quick plot of grasses—but for some cut teeth
and a tongue of May Apples, an opening,
like a surprised mouth in the face of day.
I am past the thickets of human definition
that rise from the soft ground around me,
like pencils, whose green ends pitch and swing
in the wind as they write what happens next.
A slender iridescence in the air appears,
like a hyphen between worlds, watching me
with limped eyes from a single blade of grass,
its wings shaped from the forgotten shadows of noon.
Now it is written in the trees from which it arrived,
a prince or princess in disguise, a fairy
on its way to a story meant for bedtime,
forever small and bright in lovely dreams.
Kelly Sauer says
You’ve a gift for word pictures. Somehow summing it up simply with “forever small and bright” – it does make you stop and wonder HOW something so small and bright gives so much to us.
Richard Maxson says
I’ve always found wonder in the changing surfaces of water. Early in the 1990’s I began photographing water surfaces of creeks, rivers, and some lakes. Abstract paintings fascinate me and water surfaces are like this. Here is one of my favorites taken on the sound in Safety Harbor, Florida. It reminds me of some lines from the “Nocturne” section of Kate Bush’s “Aerial.”
Golden Water
It came up on the horizon
Rising and rising
In a sea of honey, a sky of honey
A sea of honey, a sky of honey
Look at the light
All the time it’s a changing
Look at the light
Climbing up the aerial