Diana Woodcock

Diana Woodcock has authored seven poetry collections, most recently Reverent Flora ~ The Arabian Desert’s Botanical Bounty (Shanti Arts, 2025), Heaven Underfoot (2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award), Holy Sparks (2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award finalist), and Facing Aridity (2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature finalist). A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Net nominee, she received the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders. Currently teaching at VCUarts Qatar, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry's role in the search for an environmental ethic..

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► Diana Woodcock's microchap & (selected) poems are available below. Download the PDF by clicking the title.

Origami Microchap with Selected Poems

To Reverence Creation

Click title to download micro

Cover:

Polar Bear in Svalbard,
Arctic Circle

by Marcus Westberg

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ALL THIS ICY BLISS

Look how the ice walls

shine like refined halls

of celestial light.

Listen how the icebergs pop

and sizzle as they float away

over the blue-green water.

Consider how each glacier

seems more glorious

than the one before.

One thing amidst all this icy

bliss becomes clear: Misty

Fiords is as near to paradise

as one might ever get.

LIKE A RIVER

To reverence creation—

make of each new sunrise a celebration.

To let being not doing be my priority,

make silence my preference.

To keep ears attuned to suffering cries,

yet practice the peace of detachment.

To see with my heart the invisible,

believe the unbelievable.

So much is wrong – to sing a song

of thanksgiving for all that is right.

To keep still or pace with the snail

in spite of the world’s ceaseless spinning.

To make losing my goal –

possessions, obsessions –

finally realizing winning’s

not all it’s cracked up to be.

To be able to say, finally,

with rapt acceptance,

C'est la vie!

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Poets