When Our Stories Meander, the Eagle Comes: Musings on Birds, Bears, Cosmology and Quantum Physics, and How to Love the Earth

By Ronda Broatch

Often, when I write a poem, it finds its beginning from an exercise. 

A week after the pandemic-shut-down of 2020, two dear friends and I began to meet weekly, on Thursday evenings, to write. We had no place to go, which meant we suddenly found ourselves with lots of time to write—such luxury! We’d all been working outside the home, and the shut-down was only going to last a couple of weeks, so why not grab the opportunity to write together via Zoom (new technology to me!) for two hours.

We each created a writing prompt to share, often with a surrealist bent, often using words mined from existing poems, sometimes adding link to noteworthy science of the day, or some dispatch from the natural, earth-bound world. The possibilities were endless. And so, as two weeks lengthened in a month, then longer, our Thursday Night Poetry Writing three-some carried on faithfully for over a year. We wrote three poems each time we met and created three new poetry prompts each week to share. If nothing else, what a treasure of writing prompts! If nothing else, we’d amassed one-hundred-fifty poem starts each—and often fully useable, and shortly thereafter published, poems—in the span of that first COVID year. My poem here comes from one of those weekly meetings.

Walking the beaches near our home, I often hear the eagles high up in the trees, or wheeling out over the water, looking for fish to feed their young. There was the red-tailed hawk I connected briefly with on a walk on the many trails near home, the bear who on several occasions raided the apple trees and blackberry patches on our acreage, leaving hints of their visit behind to fertilize the ground—all become fertile additions to a poem.

Often questions and directions in the prompt bring up things I might have forgotten to write about, and often a word from a list or word block stirs some memory or dream and brings it to the page. Our writings are timed—usually eighteen minutes—which gets us ‘out of our heads’ so as to address as much of the prompt as possible before the timer goes off. ‘Cipher’ was undoubtedly in the list. In it went.

At the same time, I’d been reading a lot of physicist Brian Greene’s books, in particular The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, among other writings about cosmology and quantum physics, which have generated several poems. (Many of these poems are in my forthcoming book, Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023.) At the writing of this particular poem, I was grappling with my understanding of spacetime, and the concept of ‘quantum jittering’. (I’ll let you look that up. The possible rabbit holes are almost as plentiful as there are galaxies.) Add to the mix some local science re. methane plumes, and the poem reaches not only into the sky but deep into the earth, to movements that aren’t regularly visible. From earthworms to black holes, my thinking while writing often allows me to meander into realms seen, and hidden, and theorized.

Everything everywhere all at once, to make mention of the 2022 movie of the same name. That’s a little how I see this poem. And a lot about how I write.