Hey, I'm Flora and you're listening to Science Friday.

Laura, just asked me to leave a message about a special place.

I wanted to share one of my favorite places on the planet.

Calling about my place in nature that just heals my soul.

To Mark Earth Day, we asked you to take us to your favorite places on this planet. And you brought us to the woods near Traverse City, Michigan.

I experienced the joy of the bird songs and the joy of the wind through the trees and the joy of the sun coming through the canopy of the trees. And it's literally

magical. You took us to Long Island Harbor, where you spent your summer as a kid.

It always smells briny and the wind coming off from the sound is brief. It's just to feel like

you're a thousand miles away.

You took us to a lake in Oklahoma.

Every morning, I walk my dog down this lane, and it's dark, and it's quiet, and there's no one anywhere.

And every time I come upon this little hidden cove, there's some surprise. If I go late in the day, it might be a gorgeous

Grand Lake, Oklahoma sunset. Basking in a sea breeze, admiring a sunset. I mean, these are basic

human pleasures. But how do you take these moments and turn them into meaning? How do you pin them down with language? And how do you do it without sounding like a big cliche? That's my question. This is the very difficult job of my next guests. They're poets. Jane Hirshfield is the founder of poets for science, and Kimberly Blazer is the former Wisconsin poet laureate.

Jane and Kim, thank you so much for being here today.

It's a pleasure. It's a delight.

When you're doing what our listeners are doing, you know, capturing a place or a moment and then sort of doing this difficult work of turning

it into a poem or writing. Where do you begin? Jane?

Poems tend to come to me from one really precise, sharp perception that raises a question that wants to be gone into further,

felt through further, understood more deeply or felt more deeply. So the poem often begins

for me with seeing something or having a thought and then responding. But when we're

talking about poems of the earth and poems of actual perception, I both want to bring in what I

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