Unfolding Hope — The Poem
The poem came first.
Before the panels, before the torn paper and watercolor and garden sprayer — there was the story of the cranes, and I needed to find the shape of it in words. What emerged was Unfolding Hope, written in four sections that map directly to the four panels of the quadriptych.
When I began writing the poem into the surface of the work in pastel, the words changed. They became part of the landscape — layered, recolored, some legible up close, some dissolving into marks from a distance. What you read here is the full text, the version that lives underneath the image.
The four sections move through the whole arc: from what was nearly lost, through the people who refused to accept that loss, to what it means to witness recovery, to what recovery asks of us now.
Unfolding Hope
after Jane Hirshfield
Quiet Estuary
Prairie at dawn—
rainforest upside-down,
roots drinking sky,
slowing rain,
breathing carbon,
teeming with life ——
Most eyes pass without seeing.
Once,
the sandhill cranes
filled this silence with voice—
gregarious and untamed,
rattling up
from something ancient.
Emptied.
Silenced by relentless hands,
by thoughtless want,
their wings clipped.
Early 1900s—
The prairie held her breath,
clinging to the last.
Life’s Stubborn March
The land found her advocates.
Hunters loving what they hunted,
ranchers listening as the calls grew thin,
scientists counting what remained — 24.
Said:
Enough!
The Migratory Bird Treaty Act
drew a line—
not a wall — a promise.
Wetlands were protected,
refuges established,
and slowly,
stubbornly,
life reclaimed its course.
That call— prehistoric,
rattling up from the Pleistocene—
is what Aldo Leopold heard
at dawn
in the marsh
and could not
unhear.
The orchestra of evolution, he understood,
does not perform for us—
we are
her
instrument.
Courtship Dance
To see
is to notice the fragile wings,
their grace caught in morning light;
to know
is to keep returning.
When we hear that call
we hear not the past—
we hear the future.
Watch them dance—
leaping,
bowing,
choosing.
Tell me we are not them.
These are not small victories.
They are proof passed forward.
Against the forgetting.
What was nearly lost
is held again.
Knowledge Is The Bridge
From blindness
to sight.
From sight
to love.
And love, in turn—
Ranchers, hunters,
farmers,
you —
learning to listen
from roots to skies,
declaring wetlands sacred.
The Anthropocene
is not yet written.
Its last word
is the one we choose.
The cranes are calling.
Unfolding Hope is part of my solo show, made possible through the Houston Endowment Jones Artist Awards Program 2026. Presented in partnership with Weingarten Art Group.
