Diana Woodcock

Diana Woodcock’s fourth poetry collection, Facing Aridity, was published in 2021 as the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature finalist. Forthcoming in 2023 is Holy Sparks (2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award finalist). Recipient of the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, her work appears in Best New Poets 2008 and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Currently teaching at VCUarts Qatar, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where her research was an inquiry into poetry’s role in the search for an environmental ethic.

How I Became a Grain of Sand in a Cape Cod Dune

Made of glacier-gathered, scattered debris from the north, she was formed by the last Ice Age, twenty-thousand years ago. Her cranberry bogs, fresh and salt-water ponds and lakes (kettles) of deep fresh water filled in the great hollows melted ice blocks left behind when the ice sheet retreated. Every large boulder was glacier-dragged from the north.
Thus, the Cape was shapedby ice, also by wind and waves taking, redistributing land, smoothing out the coastline, extracting sand from the cliffs. Each year, three feet of shoreline disappears, and though beach grass on bare dunes may assist in resisting storms, in the end the waves, currents and wind will have their way – moving, relocating sand, reshaping the Province Lands.
Gradually narrowing, the Cape cannot escape its destiny. Still, its natural life span gives it, they say, several thousand more years. If we understand lessons in the sand, we must accept our mandate to protect the dunes – planting beach grass to stabilize barren sand, to minimize human activities causing erosion difficulties.
Yes, we must respect the grasseswithout which the dunes would dissipate on this Outer Cape where the ever-changing shape of it approaches the magnificent, majestic and mutilated, the great glacial scarp.* And so I spent my time in that sublime place, making a space for it always in my heart and mind as I became small as a grain of sand scattering from one dune to the next, reading, memorizing its text.
*Robert Finch, from the introduction to The Outermost House by Henry Beston

Put All America Behind You

A man may stand there and put all America behind him. – Henry David Thoreau
And eighteen thousand years of geologic time, nine thousand of human activity as you unwind on a peninsula protruding sixty miles into the Atlantic Ocean, on forty miles of pristine sandy beach, ponds, marshes, uplands – all supportinga diverse array of species today – a rich mosaic of marine, estuarine,fresh water and terrestrial ecosystems.
Continually shaped by tidal dynamics, ground water fluctuations, geomorphic shoreline change, atmospheric deposition. Hereare sand spits, tidal flats, salt marshes, soft-bottom benthos, kettle ponds and vernal pools, sphagnum bogs and swamps, pitch pine and scrub oak forests,heathlands and sandplain grasslands,And of course, the endearing dunes.
Rare elsewhere, here in shallow temperary ponds one can find Eastern spadefoot toads who on warm rainy nights explode into a breeding frenzy.Here on a May evening, one can listento a chorus of Spring peepers, Fowler’s toads, Grey tree frogs, Green and Bull frogs. Pre-dawn and dusk,with any luck, a red fox may come to keep you company. And a harmless Hognose snake might make an elaborate show of hissing and flaring at you like a cobra, then roll over and play dead.
Stand there, unafraid, with all America at your back, and listen to the solemn reverberation of the ocean. Feel the light westerly breeze. Let your eyes rest on the blending shades of dun sand and beach grass spears. Be thankful for all who labor here to heal and restore a fragile place gracing this outermost space like a Chinese painting on a wall – a scrollon which white space swallows the ink strokes of sparse blades of grass.
An empty luminous expanse pulling you in. Become like the space in which cordgrass takes root, without which the dunes would vanish. Leave no trace. Live in the light of the Cape. Become her child – learn from her, be devoted to her till she is fully restored in all her splendor. Wander and wonder on her rich mosaic – let her fill in the gap and bring you back from the dark brink.


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