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A moment in the prairie
On an early fall afternoon at Cannonball Prairie Metropark, poet Charles Malone started on the Leopard Frog Trail, admiring the pond built so carefully for fish, reptiles and amphibians, but it was the wide open prairie and woodland just beyond the bike path that stayed with him. The restored grasses and trees, glowing under a clear fall sky, gave him what he describes as “a glimpse of what all that wide open space could have looked like before we made use of it.” It is a view so moving it made him question the familiar saying, “Take only pictures, leave only footprints.” That moment, surrounded by sights and textures and smells, became the beginning of his #5poets5parks poem.
A celebration of poetry and parks
Metroparks Toledo’s #5poets5parks collaboration returns Friday, April 3, at Glass City Metropark Pavilion in honor of National Poetry Month. The free event pairs five regional poets with five of the 19 Metroparks, asking each writer to create an original poem rooted in a specific park’s history and biodiversity. Doors open at 5:30pm, presentations begin at 6pm, and an author signing of limited edition poem postcards will follow; light refreshments will be served.
This year’s roster stretches from North Carolina to Cincinnati to greater Lansing: Cal Freeman, Grace Guy, Charles Malone, Dior J. Stephens and Lansing Poet Laureate Ruelaine Stokes. Each has spent months visiting an assigned park: Middlegrounds, Wiregrass Lake, Cannonball Prairie, Howard Marsh and Toledo Botanical Garden. Their work joins poems from the first two years of the project, bringing the total to 15 poets interpreting 15 parks.
Where art and ecology meet
For series director and co host Julie E. Bloemeke, the heart of #5poets5parks is what happens when all of these disciplines share the same room. She sees the evening as an “organic and expansive conversation between poetry, letterpress, photography and music, all with Toledo’s love of greenspaces (and Metroparks’ devotion to eco awareness and biodiversity conservation) as the nucleus.” National Poetry Month, she notes, lets Toledo cast a regional beam inside a larger national spotlight, showing how one city can braid art and conservation together.
During the readings, projected photographs from each park taken by Christy Frank will appear alongside the poems, echoing and sometimes complicating the lines being spoken. Letterpress printer and designer Sven Olaf Nelson, founder of Pineapple Press and Design, has created custom postcards for every poem, printed on handmade paper that includes native seeds from the Metroparks nursery. Audience members can have them signed, tuck them into a book, send them through the mail, or plant them and wait for flowers to rise through the ink.
Passionate about community focused efforts in arts collaboration and biodiversity amplification, Matt Killam, chief of external relations for Metroparks Toledo, and Bloemeke collaborated to launch the #5poets5parks series in 2024. Bloemeke notes that because the event is so community-centered, Toledoans often arrive ready to share their own park memories; many of those stories span generations, and hearing them alongside new work onstage underscores how these Metroparks are not only habitats but shared family landmarks.
A lasting invitation
#5poets5parks has always been about more than one day in April. Stokes, whose work in Lansing includes water focused poetry initiatives, describes parks as homes away from home, the places where we return with family and friends to feel the full force of nature’s beauty. Metroparks leaders connect the project directly to their mission: preserving 13,000 acres of green space, putting a park within five miles of every Lucas County home, and telling the stories of these natural areas so more people feel invited in.
For Malone, the hope is simple and expansive at once. He wants someone who has never thought much about the Metroparks to “just spend time with the parks. Open your senses. Observe carefully.” Public spaces like parks and libraries, he reminds us, act as free classrooms, gyms, and meditation rooms; when we enjoy and care for them, “we also are caring for ourselves and our neighbors.” Poetry, he says, has long been an ally of environmental work: when it’s at its best, it puts image and sense to work in a way that can move feeling, and sometimes action. #5poets5parks asks what might happen if we carry that reaction back out onto the trail.
Previous editions of the program have sold out two weeks in advance, drawing everyone from dedicated poetry readers to families who simply love their neighborhood park. Registration for the April 3 event is free but limited; advance sign up is required at metroparkstoledo.com/5poets5parks. For those willing to sit still, to listen when a line lands and notice the way a photograph speaks on the screen behind it, the evening offers a rare chance to feel how art and landscape, language and habitat, can meet in one room and then follow us back into the marsh light, the prairie wind, the curve of a trail around a pond.
