Today is the 51st
anniversary of Earth Day and as is our custom we celebrate with verse. We are featuring three very different poems
new and old.
Baron Wormser was born in 1948
in Baltimore, Maryland. He earned his BA from Johns Hopkins University and did graduate work at the University
of California-Irvine and the University
of Maine. He spent 25 years as a librarian Madison, Maine. He has taught at the University of Maine-Farmington and, since 2009, in the MFA program at Fairfield University.
Wormser served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2006. Hia many honors and awards include a Frederick Bock
Prize and fellowships from Bread
Loaf, the National Endowment for
the Arts, and the Guggenheim
Foundation. He is the Director of
Education Outreach for The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.
His
many collections of poetry include The
White Words (1983); When (1997), which won a Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry; Subject Matter (2003); Scattered Chapters: New & Selected
Poems (2008); and Impenitent Notes
(2010). He has also penned a novel, short story collection, a memoir
of the years he and his family spent living
off the grid in Maine, and non-fiction books on poetry in education.
A
Quiet Life
is certainly an unconventional Earth Day poem, but speaks deeply to me and invokes the complex Web of Existence so
beloved by Unitarian Universalists and
extends it beyond the biosphere.
A Quiet Life
What a person desires in life
is a properly boiled egg.
This isn’t as
easy as it seems.
There must be
gas and a stove,
the gas requires pipelines, mastodon
drills,
banks that dispense the lozenge of capital.
There must be a
pot, the product of mines
and furnaces and factories,
of dim early mornings and night-owl shifts,
of women in kerchiefs and men with
sweat-soaked hair.
Then water, the
stuff of clouds and skies
and God knows what causes it to happen.
There seems
always too much or too little
of it and more pipelines, meters, pumping
stations, towers, tanks.
And salt-a
miracle of the first order,
the ace in any argument for God.
Only God could
have imagined from
nothingness the pang of salt.
Political peace
too. It should be quiet
when one eats an egg. No political hoodlums
knocking down doors, no lieutenants who are
ticked off at their scheming girlfriends
and
take it out on you, no dictators
posing as tribunes.
It should be
quiet, so quiet you can hear
the chicken, a creature usually mocked as a
type
of fool, a cluck chained to the chore of
her body.
Listen, she is
there, pecking at a bit of grain
that came from nowhere.
—Baron
Wormser
from Scattered Chapters. ©
1997 by Baron Wormser.
Stephanie Arena is a poet, writer, editor, and artist
living in Chicago. She is also an adventurous world traveler—she rode
a yak in Nepal—and a Buddhist and
general spiritual seeker. She attended my old school Shimer College
and got an M.A. in Mass Communications,
Writing, Video Art at the University
of Illinois Chicago.
Alaya is an Indian name most often associated with the Buddhist term ālaya-vijñāna
which roughly translates to the “storehouse consciousness.”
Alaya
The thinnest
veil of green exists between us and air we can still breathe
What is the
earth but a way of life we can still live
A murmur of
listening to nature’s murmur before the heart fails
The system
regenerates and lets go of man
And violates
special and miraculous things
The shadow of
this is a memory of time
The next moment
remembrance
We need
platitudes of life within ourselves
As kingdoms of
come, of jubilation
No one knows
what life is, a tumbledown shack or a jeweled palace
I need to
protect you and love you earth
Stars are here
and they blaze on, stardust falls and it lights the eternal way
The way of earth
and time and timelessness
Alaya I lay a
lei at your feet.
—Stephanie
Arena
©Stephanie
Arena
This
year our National Poetry Month series
has been particularly light on old
dead white males. None are deader than William Wadsworth often considered the god father of English Romantic poetry. He
often enthused about nature and the
beautiful Lake District where he
lived most famously in his verse Daffodils. This poem plows that ground but is a useful reminder to us now so concerned
with the science and technology of trying to save the Earth from eminent destruction to literally take time to smell the flowers.
The Tables
Turned
UP! up! my
Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll
grow double:
Up! up! my
Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this
toil and trouble?
The sun, above
the mountain's head,
A freshening
lustre mellow
Through all the
long green fields has spread,
His first sweet
evening yellow.
Books! 'tis a
dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the
woodland linnet,
How sweet his
music! on my life,
There’s more of
wisdom in it.
And hark! how
blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no
mean preacher:
Come forth into
the light of things,
Let Nature be
your teacher.
She has a world
of ready wealth,
Our minds and
hearts to bless—
Spontaneous
wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed
by cheerfulness.
One impulse from
a vernal wood
May teach you
more of man,
Of moral evil
and of good,
Than all the
sages can.
Sweet is the
lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling
intellect
Mis-shapes the
beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to
dissect.
Enough of
Science and of Art;
Close up those
barren leaves;
Come forth, and
bring with you a heart
That watches and
receives.
—William
Wadsworth
No comments:
Post a Comment