Today’s featured poet, the lovely , brings us a community-building exercise in the form of a mega-cento stitched together mostly from work by poets writing here on Substack. Given the cento’s length, the repetition of some phrases, and the adaptation of a few single lines to multiple lines, the source poets’ names are listed alphabetically rather than by order of appearance. If you recognize one of your lines or phrases (I found a whole short stanza from one of my poems), feel free to drop a link in the comments and say more about your work.

SOURCE POETS
, , , , , , X. P. Callahan, , , , , , Alan Girling (), , , , , , , , , , , Alane Rollings, , , , and an anonymous Chinese poet who wrote in the 1st century BCE and was translated in the 20th century CE by Arthur Waley.

ANN COLLINS is a nurse, a naturalist, a contemplative, and one of the kindest people ever to grace our planet. She writes Microseasons on Substack.

LISA JENSEN—forest therapy guide, poet, nature-lover, and life coach—is the author of the novel All Is Well (Wild Ground, 2025). She writes on Substack.

KATHLEEN WEDL grew up on the Minnesota prairie, spent fifty years as a nurse specializing in behavioral health, and lives now in Minneapolis. She is the author of the collection Ordinary Time (Kelsay Books, 2023).

PAUL WITTENBERGER, one of Substack’s most prolific and beloved poets, surprised me recently with a copy of his new collection, Beyond These Wounds (Blue Moth Press, 2026), then followed up by sending me his first-ever cento, the poem you just read. Find more of Paul’s poetry here.

REBECCA WEIL is the author of Bring Me the Ocean: Nature as Teacher, Messenger, and Intermediary (‎ VanderWyk & Burnham, 1995), an award-winning collection of true stories about connecting individuals and communities with nature. Her work has appeared in One, Emerge Literary Journal, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Humana Obscura, River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art, The Journal of Wild Culture, and pangyrus. Rebecca’s recent chapbook is Shadow of a Bear: A Poem in 23 Passages (Monday Editions, 2025).