Bitter-cold wind whips across the frozen surface of Leverett Pond, rustling the bare branches of a maple tree on its southern shore and sending dry leaves skittering across the ice. Cattails sway against brittle reeds; snowpack surrounds sparse vegetation along the water’s edge, creating white islands in the marshy ground.
If not for the cars driving by on Depot Road, it would be easy to forget that anything exists beyond the 100-plus-acre lake’s oblong circumference.
But even at this desolate time of the year, perceptive visitors can find signs of life. Songbirds, hidden among the rushes, break the silence; crows screech in reply from the shoreline. It’s not just nature’s vibrancy that’s evident here; there’s another kind of vitality that can be found inside a wooden box nailed to a nearby tree: Poetry.
“The kingfisher we had come to study stooped/To take a tiny fish, while a young falcon stooped/To take both on a wing,” begins one poem titled “Native Bow Fishing at Leverett Pond.” It was written in 2017 by Amherst poet John Paul Maynard and is the first in a large notebook containing dozens of poems, some written anonymously in pencil, others typed out and signed. They have been kept safe from the elements inside the rudimentary box for the past decade or so.
The Depot Road poetry box is one of eight situated along nature trails throughout town as part of the Leverett Poetry Boxes project, a townwide initiative managed by the Leverett Trails Committee and co-sponsored by the Leverett Conservation Committee and the Rattlesnake Gutter Trust. The project was initially funded in 2012 by the Leverett Cultural Council through a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant as a way to promote the town’s trails, according to an informational sheet included in the notebook. Its inception dates back to the late 2000s, when the trails committee was pushing to create new trails on conservation land.
“In the beginning, we focused on rebuilding trails that existed but had not been maintained, then (on) building connecting trails,” said Mary Alice Wilson, now of Putney, Vt., a member of the original group that put the boxes together. “At a meeting that I thought was going to be about trail maintenance, someone said — as I remember, it was Judith Davidov — ‘We need to do more than just build trails. We need to encourage folks to stop and look, to take photographs.’ ”
To that end, over the next few years, the trails committee held three photography exhibits at the Leverett Library featuring local nature images. During the final exhibit, Janine Roberts, a local poet, came up with the existing poetry-on-the-trails project.
“It was a gestalt of getting people out on the trails, helping people understand how other people were experiencing it, and, at the same time, recognizing the power of words to connect people to nature,” Roberts recalled. “I got the original idea from the Revolving Museum in Lowell because they put poetry boxes along the canal.”
Roberts, 72, lives and works as a certified therapist out of her home on Leverett Pond, a place close to her heart that provides constant poetic inspiration. When the temperature drops, the lake “sings” and she hears the ice cracking. Out over the water, the sky opens up: “You can watch meteorites falling and listen to beavers,” she said. The land “inhabits my poetry.”
Leverett is a special place, Roberts explained, because, “You have such different environments in a relatively small space — you have Rattlenake Gutter, which is a remarkable trip back in time, and the pond, where so many different animals gather.”
Poetry has a way of capturing this beauty — “The otters, mink and all the different types of birds” — and preserving it for others to appreciate.
More than that, writing is an important mental outlet for Roberts. She ran the doctoral therapy program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for 25 years before retiring early in 2006. “The first thing I did … was work on a poetry book,” she said. “A lot of my work has been pretty intense, with all kinds of complexities and intricacies that people are working through — poetry, for me, was a way to hold and contain some of the intensity of that … so I could be anchored and available to other people.”
This perspective served as the project’s backbone. To that end, Roberts led three workshops at the library, providing guidance and prompts, and Rich Michelson, who was at that time Northampton’s poet laureate, received a grant to host a series of workshops at area schools, including one at Leverett Elementary School. Roberts noted the project was a cross-town collaboration — she highlighted efforts by Anne Ross, the Leverett school’s principal, upper-grade teachers Bill Stewart, Alyson Bull and Christine Paglia Baker, library teacher Susan Wells and Steve Woodard and David Powicki, who built the boxes.
“Janine wrote a grant that paid for a school bus to bring students to the 4-H Forest, the Woodard Family and the Gordon King Conservation Areas to observe and jot down ideas that might become poems,” Wilson said.
Many of the poems inspired by that trip can still be found in the poetry boxes. Besides the one at the Leverett Pond boat access, there are boxes on Rattlesnake Gutter Road, Long Hill Trail, 4-H Trail, Woodard’s Corner, Gordon King Life Estate, East Leverett Meadow and Bates Sanctuary (eight altogether). The poems, which are sometimes accompanied by photographs, range in topic from personal to experiential to historical. For example, transcending time, Maynard’s piece conjures a pre-Colonial scene of three Native Americans — two boys and their father — fishing near the same place where a picnic table now resides.
“The land is yours/Nonetheless. You need no license to fish anywhere./In the end, you caught the only fish which matters:/The rainbow that was there and not there./I saw you aim away from it — you compensated —/You shot your arrow at nothing. And it hit,” the poem concludes.
Maynard, a member of the Hadley Historical Society, explained the impetus behind his 2017 poem in a recent email exchange. He said it was inspired by a desire to accurately re-tell the region’s history.
“When I went to school in Connecticut, we were told there were no more Indians in this valley region,” Maynard said. “But that is incorrect. The Nipmuc, a recognized tribe” (which has offices in Grafton these days) and “the Pocumtuc, now extinct,” lived in Western Mass.
Through poetry like Maynard’s, Roberts says today’s world is connected to bygone eras.
“There’s a way in which (poetry) holds us, in our context, in our history, these things that appear here and there in the land,” Roberts said, noting that compared to prose writing, poetry “is so focused. You can condense myriad meanings into just a few words. I think it’s really optimal to hold a longer perspective.”
The combination of creativity and the outdoors that’s facilitated by the boxes invites visitors to slow down and notice nature’s details, such as a maze of lines cut by insects into the exposed flesh of a fallen trunk and the murmur of a brook passing beneath Friendship Trail, which is adjacent to the Depot Road poetry box.
On a more recent spring-like day in February, Roberts paged to a poem written by a friend, Jose Humberto Chavez Urbina, of Guadalajara, Mexico, whom she met at a literary fest in 2011. Urbina wrote the verse while visiting Leverett in 2013, Roberts said, as the season’s first red-winged blackbirds serenaded in the background, having returned a day or so before from their southerly migration.
“Without the others, we are nothing; we are inert rock — dust that is carried by the wind; an island that is uninhabited,” she read. Looking out over the pond, she added, “It’s fun to revisit this, and, also, to see some of the newer (poems) people have put in here.”
Another box, located about a quarter-mile down 4-H Trail on Shutesbury Road, affords an entirely different poetic experience. The landscape of Leverett’s 4-H Forest, a 38-acre conservation area abutting Teawaddle Hill Road, is much different than Leverett Pond’s ecology. The forest is dominated by towering conifers and willowy saplings, with much less ground cover. Undoubtedly, in warmer months, passersby serve as easy prey for mosquito populations living in the many vernal pools that can be seen through the trees. Today, however, there are no buzzing insects.
Instead, winter’s eerie quiet blankets the peaceful wood. A winding path skirts a moss-covered stone wall until it rises to an overlook. At the edge is a wooden bench overlooking Doolittle Brook, which snakes its way downhill toward the lake. A box nailed to a thick tree contains more poems.
Among short notations of wildlife sightings — a bobcat sighting on Yellow Trail beneath the power lines in September of 2017 and a dead coyote seen in February of 2018, to name a few — poetic verses color the woods in a much different light than the day’s overcast atmosphere.
“Lightning hits the tree crack boom/the tree hits the ground/I’m sure that the lightning will strike again,” begins one anonymous poem. At 11 a.m. on May 5, 2018, someone else documented, “Tipped trillium/Bowed their heads/In humbleness.” A third traveler, identified only by the initials “K.B.,” shared these lines from 19th-century English poet George Gordon Byron’s narrative piece, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”: “There’s a pleasure in the pathless woods,/A rapture on the lonely shore,/I do not love man less,/but nature more.”
Nearly a decade on — in which time only one box was damaged, according to Joan Godsey, a long-time member of the Rattlesnake Gutter Trust — it’s unclear how many people have enjoyed these and other verses contained in the notebooks. What is for certain is that the Leverett Poetry Boxes project has achieved its goal: that is, to encourage visitors to stop and appreciate the charming beauty of the region’s quiet woods, which, of course, also served as inspiration for famous New England writers like Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost, author of “The Road Not Taken” — a poem that captures a sentiment similar to that which is overflowing from many of Leverett’s locally penned trail-side poems:
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,/And sorry I could not travel both/And be one traveler, long I stood/And looked down one as far as I could/To where it bent in the undergrowth;/Then took the other, as just as fair,/And having perhaps the better claim,/Because it was grassy and wanted wear;/Though as for that the passing there/Had worn them really about the same,/And both that morning equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black./Oh, I kept the first for another day!
“Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back./I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence:/Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference.”
Andy Castillo can be reached at acastillo@recorder.com.