A photo by Stuart Wolf of a young deer and its mother, a treasured summer sight.

Coast Weekend periodically sends out calls for reader-submitted art, poetry, short stories and images. In August, readers were invited to recall the summer season and look ahead to fall days.

The items on this page were sent in by Coast Weekend readers. Watch for future calls to submit art for a chance to be featured in print.

‘Sea Change’ by Wendy Wolf

It’s a trick to find

whole sand dollars

on the beach.

Chalky, fragile,

crumbling at the slightest pressure.

The delicate bones of beings

no longer alive.

I found one crushed

(beneath a tire?).

It’s a wide swath of beach

where cars often drive.

And instead of the pieces dispersed,

it was whole,

an intricate mosaic

of snowy white shards.

In the center,

the star,

still roughly shining.

‘Riverocean’ by Janice Leber

our constant companion

is a lake in canada

that roams over a thousand miles

carrying memories of mountain, meadow, forest,

bird, bear, dragonfly, deer,

as it winds its way to the sea

and here we sit,

in this rare between-place,

on the edge of riverocean:

land and water, fresh and salt,

mountain, meadow, forest,

bird, bear, dragonfly, deer;

the biggest miracle is

that we are here to bear witness.

‘Trees and Me’ by Anthony Pfannenstiel

Who gets lost in our world, confused,

Bewildered in the middle kingdom between heaven and hell?

You do? If you do, don’t be,

Like me, just standing there, staring down.

I say, “look up,”

Cotton woods, sequoias, ponderosa.

Their thick blood spills your salvation, spells your name

in leafy syllables. You can swallow the girth

of their swollen circumference,

Begging to dig down into your wet soil,

Composted brain matter to fuel your dreams,

or to fertilize what lies beneath

the earth of your body.

Trees were never meant for killing.

If you cut, by accident, your tap root,

listen to its wisened sap,

to the beats of a pileated woodpecker,

thrumming deep inside the corpus of your tree,

Barking out holy orders for you to follow.

Stand up. Sink roots.

At this green stage of your life, take boughs.

I have few friends. Most are trees.