Celebrate Writers, Nature & Community To make a donation to Watershed mail your donation to Poetry Flash or click the link below to donate via credit card or PayPal August 2010 Dear Friend of Watershed, Each year, to support and produce the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, we commission a hand-printed broadside of a poem by one of our featured readers. This year we've excerpted from "July Notebook: The Birds" by Robert Hass, from The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems. For a donation of $25 or more supporting Watershed, you will receive this beautiful broadside as a thank you. Please join us on October 2, for the 15th annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival at Berkeley's Civic Center Park. Again, we'll be gathering with intention&emdash;ready to engage the earth, to generate, with poetry, music, and art, the spirit we need to fuel a movement, ready to celebrate being together and to do what needs to be done. We will be transforming Berkeley's Civic Center Park with beautiful Watershed banners created by the late Bolinas artist Arthur Okamura, a Creek Poem installation, and River Village exhibits all beside the lively Berkeley Farmers' Market, in full swing when the main stage presentations begin. New parachute-shade structures will debut at this festival. Featured this year are outstanding poets, writers, and artists, including poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Rope, Brenda Hillman, Practical Water, David Meltzer, Beat Thing, Robert Hass, and Al Young, Something About the Blues; Camille T. Dungy, poet and editor of Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry; environmental correspondent for Mother Jones and O. Henry Award-winner Julia Whitty, Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean; Annie Leonard, The Book of Stuff; John Felstiner, Can Poetry Save the Earth? A Field Guide to Nature Poems; California Poets in the Schools, River of Words, and Poetry Inside Out K-12 student poets; interspersed with dynamic music from Barry Finnerty's Jazz Roots Trio and important eco-updates from Ecocity Builders and The Ecology Center. The annual Strawberry Creek Walk begins at 10 a.m., October 2, just inside the UC Berkeley campus at Oxford and Center Streets. You're invited to join poets and environmentalists, including Chris Olander, Dale Pendell, and Ecocity's Kirstin Miller, for a walk along Strawberry Creek from the UC Campus through downtown Berkeley, tracing the route of the creek as it tunnels beneath the city to the site of the festival. Along the way, there will be readings and updates on "daylighting" and restoring the Creek. Thursday, September 30, 7:30, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Julia Whitty, and others will participate in a Watershed panel at Moe's Books in Berkeley. And on Friday, Watershed poets will visit Berkeley High School for an exciting poetry session with the students. Your support is needed to help cover Watershed's expenses. It is essential that this festival remain free, public, and open to all. To help out with a tax deductable contribute,donate either on-line (see button above) or by mail to: Watershed c/o Poetry Flash 1450 Fourth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 Thank you for your support, Mark Baldridge, Director, Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival from July Notebook: The Birds Robert Hass Late afternoons in June the fog rides in across the ridge of pines, ghosting them, and settling on the bay to give a muted gray luster to the last hours of light and take back what we didn't know at midday we'd experience as lack: the blue of summer and the dry spiced scent of the summer woods. It's as if some cold salt god had wandered inland for a nap. You still see herons fishing in the shallows, a kingfisher or an osprey emerges for a moment out of the high, drifting mist, then vanishes again. And the soft, light green leaves of the thimbleberry and the ridged coffeeberry leaves and the needles of the redwoods and pines look more sprightly in the cool gray air with the long dusk coming on, since fog is their natural element. I had it in mind that this description of the weather would be a way to say things come and go, a way of subsuming the rhythms of arrival and departure to a sense of how brief the time is on a summer afternoon when the sun is warm on your neck and the world might as well be a dog sleeping on a porch, or a child for whom an afternoon is endless, endless. Time: thick honey, and no one saying good-bye. From The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems, copyright 2010 by Robert Hass. Used by permission of the author. 150 copies printed at Poltroon Press for the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, Berkeley, 2 October 2010. Illustration by Jinny Pearce.