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| Nature gives me so much to feel—wonder, happiness, curiosity, peace, and sometimes sadness too. I never quite know which moment will become a poem. I only know that when something in the wild touches me deeply enough, I want to put that feeling into words. |
The Feelings Nature Turns into Poetry
I don’t remember deciding that I wanted to write poetry.
It seemed to happen much more quietly than that.
I would see something in nature that made me stop. A flower growing where I didn’t expect one. Sunlight slipping through the trees. The sound of water moving over stones. A bird disappearing into the distance. Clouds gathering before a storm.
And I would feel something.
Sometimes I understood the feeling immediately. Sometimes I didn’t.
Eventually, I began putting those feelings into words.
That is where my poetry comes from.
Nature Makes Me Feel
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| Sometimes I don’t want to hide from the rain. I want to stand beneath it, lift my hands to the sky and feel every drop against my skin. Moments like this make me forget everything else for a while. I’m soaked, my hair is a mess, and I couldn’t be happier. |
Nature can make me incredibly happy.
There are days when I want to run barefoot through a meadow, feel the wind in my hair and laugh for no reason other than the world feels beautiful.
I love the warmth of sunlight on my skin. The smell of rain. The sound of rivers and waves. The cool shade beneath trees. Mountains disappearing into clouds. Tiny creatures going about lives completely separate from mine.
Sometimes I feel peaceful.
Sometimes I feel free.
Sometimes I feel so full of wonder that I don’t know what to do with it.
So I write.
But nature doesn’t always make me happy.
It can make me terribly sad too.
I can look at a fallen tree and wonder how long it stood there. I can find a flower beginning to wilt and think about how briefly it was allowed to bloom. Seeing an injured animal hurts. Seeing beautiful wild places damaged or destroyed can make me angry.
Even the changing seasons can make me strangely emotional.
There is something bittersweet about watching beautiful things disappear.
I don’t want my poetry to pretend those feelings aren’t there.
Nature can be beautiful and frightening. Gentle and brutal. Full of beginnings and endings.
I want to write about all of it.
When Nature Hurts
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| Some parts of nature fill me with wonder. Others break my heart. Standing here, I can’t stop thinking about everything that once lived beneath these trees—the animals, the flowers, the tiny lives we may never even have noticed. Loving nature means feeling its beauty deeply, but it also means feeling its loss. |
There is another side of loving the natural world.
When you care deeply about something, seeing it hurt can hurt you too.
A forest reduced to broken ground is not beautiful to me. Plastic washed onto a beach doesn’t disappear simply because the sunset behind it is gorgeous. An animal suffering isn’t something I can easily put out of my mind.
And nature itself can be cruel.
Storms destroy.
Fire consumes.
Animals hunt other animals.
Rivers flood.
Living things die.
I don’t think loving nature means pretending those things don’t exist.
Sometimes they frighten me. Sometimes they make me angry. Sometimes they leave me with a sadness I can’t quite explain.
Those feelings belong in my poetry too.
Because poetry isn’t only where I keep beautiful things.
Sometimes it is where I put the things that hurt.
I’m Still Curious
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| There’s something about the Australian landscape that makes me stop and look a little longer. A galah and cockatoo chatting above me, banksias nearby, red earth in the distance, and an old gum tree stretching over it all. There is so much life here, and I’m curious about every little piece of it. |
I ask a lot of questions.
Probably too many.
I want to know why a flower grows in one place but not another. Where a river begins. Where birds are going when they disappear over the horizon. What creatures are hiding beneath the water. What a forest sounds like when nobody is there to hear it.
Sometimes my questions are less sensible.
Does a meadow feel different after everyone has gone?
What has an old tree witnessed?
Why can the smell of rain make me remember something I thought I had forgotten?
Why can a tiny flower growing through a crack in the earth make me ridiculously happy?
I don’t always find answers.
I’m beginning to think that might be part of the reason I love poetry.
A poem doesn’t always have to answer the question.
Sometimes it can simply sit beside it and wonder too.
The Poems I Love to Write
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| Sometimes I love letting rhyme and rhythm carry my thoughts, and sometimes I want my words to be completely free. I never know which kind of poem a moment in nature will become until I begin writing. |
I love poems that make me feel as though I’m standing inside a moment.
I’m drawn to lyrical poetry because I love imagery, emotion and the sound of words together. I love free verse because it gives me room to follow a feeling without forcing it somewhere it doesn’t naturally want to go.
I also love small poems.
There is something wonderful about trying to capture one tiny observation in only a handful of words.
A raindrop trembling on a leaf.
A butterfly resting for just a moment.
Moonlight touching the ocean.
A single flower moving in the breeze.
Sometimes that is enough.
Other times a feeling needs more space, and the poem becomes a story.
I don’t want to write in only one form. There are too many ways to feel something, and I think there should be just as many ways to write about it.
I’m still learning.
I hope I always will be.
My Love of Flowers
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| Flowers have a way of making me stop everything for a moment. I love their colours, their tiny details, their softness and the way each one feels completely different from the next. Give me a handful of flowers and somewhere beautiful to sit, and I’ll probably forget what I was supposed to be doing. |
I love all of nature.
Forests, mountains, rivers, oceans, meadows, deserts, animals, storms, stars…
I want to experience as much of it as I can.
But flowers have always had a special hold on me.
Maybe it’s because something so delicate can also be astonishingly determined.
Flowers appear in forests and gardens, beside rivers, across mountainsides and through fields of grass. Some bloom for only a short time. Others return year after year.
Some demand your attention with extraordinary colours.
Others are so tiny you could walk straight past them.
I try not to.
I like getting close enough to notice the things that are easy to miss—the shape of the petals, the tiny patterns near the centre, the way sunlight changes their colour, or the little insects that have already discovered them before I arrive.
Every flower feels like a tiny world.
And yes…
I have a favourite.
Especially Daisies
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| I love the way sunlight finds every little petal, turning ordinary daisies into something that seems to glow. Sometimes the simplest flowers are the ones that make me stop and look a little longer. |
Daisies.
I know.
Of all the extraordinary flowers in the world, I choose one of the simplest.
But perhaps that’s exactly why I love them.
They don’t seem to need attention.
They grow among grasses, beside paths and across open fields, holding their little faces toward the sky as though being alive is reason enough to celebrate.
There is something wonderfully cheerful about them.
And something resilient.
A daisy doesn’t have to be rare to be beautiful.
It doesn’t have to be perfect.
It doesn’t have to be somewhere extraordinary.
Sometimes it is simply there, growing quietly beneath your feet, waiting for you to notice it.
I think there’s a poem hiding somewhere in that.
Actually…
there are probably hundreds.
Words Nature Gives Me
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| Before I write, I like to listen. The birds, the water, the leaves moving above me—sometimes nature already knows what it wants to say. I just need to be quiet long enough to hear it. |
I don’t know where my poetry will eventually take me.
There are still forests I haven’t stepped into, mountains I haven’t climbed, oceans I haven’t seen and flowers whose names I don’t even know yet.
There are feelings I haven’t experienced.
Questions I haven’t thought to ask.
And poems I haven’t found the words for.
That excites me.
Because every time I step outside, there is a chance that something ordinary will suddenly become extraordinary.
Something will catch my eye.
I’ll stop.
I’ll feel something.
And somewhere inside that feeling, perhaps another poem will begin.
— Khalia Wildawn 🌼
Where Would You Like to Go Next?
🌿 Back to Where It All Begins
Come back to my home among the wild and see what else is waiting to be discovered - Home
🌼 Come Get to Know Me
There’s more to me than the poems I write. I’d love to tell you a little about who I am and the things that make me, me - Hello, I’m Khalia