For a forest friend
Going quiet in the forest is exhilarant living.
Leave your sugar frosted latte
speaker phone in airplane mode.
Choose wild cherries and passion flowers.
There are thrills in trills in the trees,
the slow dance of coasting birds,
frog song conga lines at dusk.
Go quietly and with someone
who stoops to toad stools; stops, looks
and listens with hawk-sharp senses
when birds swoop and sing and and preen.
Befriend a heron. Admire the anhinga.
Snatch some happiness. There are no sad trees.
Complete a circuit with the gentle electricity
of life with no bars amid the cable tangles
of wild grape. Take a wrong turn and discover
there are no wrong turns, just fresh perspectives.
Stay until it rains or stay when it rains.
There are sheltering thickets just for that.
Become close together with everything
that creeps and peeps and sports petals.
It’s what forest walks are for, finding
something you never knew was there.
Going Quiet in the Forest
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Trampoline, Unlikely Stories, Peauxdunque Review, LMNL Anthology, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 
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