The following haiku were written during a weekend of meditation and wildflower admiration spent at Illinois State Beach and in the adjoining oak savanna and wetlands, on the shore of Lake Michigan, north of Chicago.

Reflections, Illinois State Beach
by Wendy Liles
May 26, 2001

Click this image to link to a series of photographs taken by Wendy Liles
of the landscape that inspired these verses.

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The sun warms the rock.
The rock invites me to sit
and share the morning.

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One perfect white stone
on the beach; one perfect black.
How then shall I choose?

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Alewives in long rows
washed up on shore-- price of the
next generation.

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Alewives in long rows
washed up on the beach-- the price
of our tinkering.

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They still blaze orange,
last year's stems of marram grass--
defying the spring.

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The tread of Lake-smoothed
cobble; the yield of wet sand;
poignant memory.

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Swallow in the sand--
blue head I'd not seen until
we both sat resting.

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Cool, gray and misty,
the afternoon becomes rain.
Lake and sky are one.

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An afternoon rain
falls. The Lake receives it, calm.
What is one more drop?

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Swallows bank swiftly
left, right. Waves, too, are shifting.
Nothing stays the same.

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The Dead River flows
to the Lake-- alive, despair
briefly subsiding.

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Oaks dead and living
spread wide their rough, twisted limbs
to embrace blue stars.

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Winds in the black oaks
mimic the Lake's distant wash.
Catbirds mock touhys.

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Tentative questions
of single chorus frogs meld
into insistence.

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All night the swallows--
with my eyes closed, in your arms,
invading my dreams.

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