U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón kicks off her signature project, “You Are Here: Poetry in Parks,” with the unveiling of a poetry installation at Cape Cod National Seashore, June 14, 2024. The project, in partnership with the National Park Service and Poetry Society of America, features picnic tables in national parks decorated with poems and writing prompts for visitors.

Poetry in Parks is an initiative to install poetry on picnic tables in seven national parks. As public works of art, the picnic tables will each feature a historic American poem selected by the 24^th U.S. National Poet Laureate, Ada Limón. Limón selected the poems to encourage visitors to pay deeper attention to their surroundings. Limón will travel to each of the parks in the summer and fall of 2024 to unveil the new installations.

“I want to champion the ways reading and writing poetry can situate us in the natural world. Never has it been more urgent to feel a sense of reciprocity with our environment, and poetry’s alchemical mix of attention, silence, and rhythm gives us a reciprocal way of experiencing nature—of communing with the natural world through breath and presence.”
-U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón

Can You Imagine?

by Mary Oliver

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now – whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade – surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.