A Melancholy Earth Day—National Poetry Month 2024

Note—This is both Earth Day and Passover begins tonight.  That means a bonus—double posts to Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout to cover both bases.

Today is Earth Day.  It seemed like a very big deal when it was introduced in 1970.  The Environmental Movement as we know it was still in its relative infancy having grown out of the earlier Conservation Movement that emphasized the husbanding of natural resources for human use.  It seems in those early years when hundreds of thousands responded to calls to march or participate in some way that real change was possible.

Three years before the first Earth Day underground cartoonist R. Cobb invented the omega symbol for the burgeoning ecology movement in 1967.

And, of course, much was accomplished—the EPA was established and increased regulation of pollution, the hands-on movement to re-cycle and re-use, the on-going involvement of children which critics charge has now become a virtual secular religion.  But despite it all, the Planet is in more desperate shape today than it was then.  The Cassandra warnings about climate change have come true in spades, faster than anyone really expected. 

Yet resistance to real change to address the root causes has never been fiercer—or more successful—as it is fueled by billionaire exploiters and exploited by rabid right wing movements.  If liberals love the Planet, conservatives MUST attack it wrapping themselves in an ideology of unfettered capitalism  and apocalyptic Evangelical claims that the End of Days is at hand so humans can and should squeeze every ounce of value from the Earth that will be thrown away anyway. on the other.

All of that as enabled by the former Wrecker-in-Chief who threw hand grenades at international environmental cooperation, dismantled every Federal environmental regulation he can find including those that successfully cleaned American water and largely scrubbed the skies of pollution.  And in the face of incontrovertible evidence of looming irreversible disaster actively promoted increase carbon emissions from dirty coal and petroleum while attacking renewable energy like those cancer causing windmills.  His minions in state governments have taken over the work and scramble to out do each other in environmental Sabotage.  

R. Cobb always had a macabre side.  He envisioned the destruction of the Earth by human greed and stupidity whether from nuclear war or environmental catastrophe.  That dark side captures the concerns of many today better than the sunny we-can-fix-it optimism of 1970.

President Joe Biden has scrambled to undo as much of the Federal level attacks as possible, but action drags on as bureaucratic “I”s are dotted and “T”s crossed.  And there is only so much he can do by executive action, so he faces the daunting task of moving new and restored legislation through Congress where MAGA Republicans still maintain a majority.

Most of the early optimism of Earth Day has faded.  The environmental collapse predicted by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 is coming true faster than the most alarmed Cassandras of science predicted.  Most think the tipping point has come and gone.  Mass extinctions loom, violent weather disasters not only become routine but intensify year by year. Ocean temperatures and sea levels rise drowning polar bears and threatening low lying land across the globe.  Scorching heat and deforestation create deserts at a galloping pace.  Famine  stalks the world as changing climate destroys agriculture.  Some say a total collapse of modern civilizations is inevitable now within 100 years—or less.

The Apocalypse may indeed be at hand—but not the one that will rapture believers and leave behind a ruined earth.  It may be the one that dooms the doubters and the increasingly frantic alarmists as well.

So today’s Earth Day poetry collections are not the rapturous odes to nature of nearly 50 years ago.

The alarm is shared with a last desperate and perhaps naïve appeal by an obscure poet to an on-line poetry page.

Save Environment

 

Earth comes to an end,
Save it my friends!

Pollution is going on,
In every city, village and town.

Stop this ghost of pollution,
There are many solutions.

Do not pollute; water and air,
Don’t throw garbage, here and there.

You can do something now, or never,
Let’s save Our Earth forever!

—Shiangi Gupta

The Environmental Movement rose in tandem with neo-paganism or Earth centered spirituality.  The goddess Gaia—Mother Nature embodied as the Earth—is now herself threatened.

Gaia, a sculpture by Lorenzo Quinn.

Gaia’s Demise

Mother Gaia, what have we done?
You birthed us from your benevolent womb.
You feed and clothe us, protect us;

gave us life but, we are left wanting when it,

comes to gratitude.

We have shredded and poisoned your land and seas;
over fished, over hunted; slaughtering even
the forests and for...greed.
Human ego is the genuine...Devil.

Existing to gain; loving money more than family;
a species of doom is the human being;

lacking...humanity.
When it comes to our siblings, animal and plant;

to our mother, we exhibit indifference.

We have lowered our species to a level beneath the cockroach;

all we’ve touched has been destroyed.
We blame the cows for Global Warming

but, we humans are the guilty,

the depraved and mangled minds, who are to blame.

Forgive us, Mother, we do know what we’ve done to you.
What we don’t collectively realize is that,

what we’ve done to you, we do to ourselves, in the end.

William was right when he penned, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

The fools of the universe;

our great shame is that, we don’t work together enough to save you.

 

—M.L. Kiser

 

This poet grieves but offers faint hope.

Once the World Was Perfect

Once the world was perfect, and we were happy in that world.

Then we took it for granted.

Discontent began a small rumble in the earthly mind.

Then Doubt pushed through with its spiked head.

And once Doubt ruptured the web,

All manner of demon thoughts

Jumped through—

We destroyed the world we had been given

For inspiration, for life—

Each stone of jealousy, each stone

Of fear, greed, envy, and hatred, put out the light.

No one was without a stone in his or her hand.

There we were,

Right back where we had started.

We were bumping into each other

In the dark.

And now we had no place to live, since we didn’t know

How to live with each other.

Then one of the stumbling ones took pity on another

And shared a blanket.

A spark of kindness made a light.

The light made an opening in the darkness.

Everyone worked together to make a ladder.

A Wind Clan person climbed out first into the next world,

And then the other clans, the children of those clans, their children,

And their children, all the way through time—

To now, into this morning light to you.

 

—Joy Harjo

But perhaps Shelly had the clearest vision of all more than 200 years ago.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

A Latina Gets the Nod—Ada Limón Named Next Poet Laureate

                                Newly announced U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

It has become a tiresome cliché here at Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout for the proprietor to complain about being passed over each time a new Poet Laureate of the United States—Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for all you sticklers for formality.

Of course, although my single, slim, and widely unread volume of work is officially in the Library’s collection, I am sure no one there is actually aware of its existence.  My footprint on the Web is ephemeral.  I only occasionally read at very local venues far from academic or urban centers.  At best only a few hundred have ever read or heard a single of one the Old Man’s poems.  So no, I will never be considered nor should I.

In recent years the Library of Congress has cast a wide net to recognize diverse voices by class, race, ethnicity, regional roots, and occupations.  That continues with the announcement that Ada Limón, a 46-year-old Mexican-American from California will assume the duties this September.

 

She has exceptionally large shoes to fill.  Native American Joy Harjo is completing three consecutive one year terms, tenure matched only by Robert Pinsky.  That long appointment was partially due to disruptions caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, but also by Harjo’s remarkably vigorous body of work and dedication to promoting contemporary poetry.

                                    Limón will be filling the exceptionally large shoes of Native American poet Joy Harjo.

Limón was born on March 28, 1976 and raised in Sonoma, California. As a child, she was greatly influenced by visual arts and artists, including her mother, Stacia Brady.  She attended the drama school at the University of Washington, where she studied theatre. In 2001, she received an MFA from the creative writing program at New York University where Sharon Olds, Philip Levine, Marie Howe, Mark Doty, Agha Shahid Ali, and Tom Sleigh were among her teachers.

Upon graduation, Limón received a fellowship to live and write at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 2003, she received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in the same year won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry.

She spent 12 years living in New York City supporting herself as a writer at magazines including Martha Stewart Living, GQ, and Travel + Leisure, none known for their literary content.  But the jobs gave her the opportunity to hone her verse.  

                                          Limón's acclaimed collection Bright Dead Things.

Limón has published six poetry collections, Lucky Wreck which won the Autumn House Poetry Prize in 2005,   Big Fake World winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize in 2006, National Book Award finalist Bright Dead Things in 2015, The Carrying in 2018 which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and The Hurting Kind this year. She is also the host of the podcast The Slowdown.

Limón currently splits her time between homes in Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma where she lives with her husband Lucas Marquardt, a thoroughbred and racing writer.

 

Limón with husband Lucas Marquardt.

Upon her selection as the next Laureate, Limón told NPR’s All Things Considered:

I think that it’s really important to remember that even in this particularly hard moment, divided moment, poetry can really help us reclaim our humanity. I think we need to remember that we possess the full spectrum of human emotions. And I think moving through that grief and trauma, anger, rage — through poetry I think we can actually remember that on the other side of that is also contentment, joy, a little peace now and again, and that those are all a part of the same spectrum. And that without one, we don’t have the other.

Here is a small sample of Limón’s work.

Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America

It’s a day when all the dogs of all

the borrowed houses are angel footing

down the hard hardwood of middle-America’s

newly loaned-up renovated kitchen floors,

and the world’s nicest pie I know

is somewhere waiting for the right

time to offer itself to the wayward

and the word-weary. How come the road

goes coast to coast and never just

dumps us in the water, clean and

come clean, like a fish slipped out

of the national net of “longing for joy.”

How come it doesn’t? Once, on a road trip

through the country, a waitress walked

in the train's diner car and swished

her non-aproned end and said,

“Hot stuff and food too.” My family

still says it, when the food is hot,

and the mood is good inside the open windows.

I’d like to wear an apron for you

and come over with non-church sanctioned

knee-highs and the prettiest pie of birds

and ocean water and grief. I’d like

to be younger when I do this, like the country

before Mr. Meriwether rowed the river

and then let the country fill him up

till it killed him hard by his own hand.

I'd like to be that dog they took with them,

large and dark and silent and un-blamable.

Or I’d like to be Emily Dickinson’s dog, Carlo,

and go on loving the rare un-loveable puzzle

of woman and human and mind. But, I bet I’m more

the house beagle and the howl and the obedient

eyes of everyone wanting to make their own kind

of America, but still be America, too. The road

is long and all the dogs don’t care too much about

roadside concrete history and postcards of state

treasures, they just want their head out the window,

and the speeding air to make them feel faster

and younger, and newer than all the dogs

that went before them, they want to be your only dog,

your best-loved dog, for this good dog of today

to be the only beast that matters.

 

—Ada Limón

 

How to Triumph Like a Girl

 

I like the lady horses best,

how they make it all look easy,

like running 40 miles per hour

is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

I like their lady horse swagger,

after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!

But mainly, let’s be honest, I like

that they’re ladies. As if this big

dangerous animal is also a part of me,

that somewhere inside the delicate

skin of my body, there pumps

an 8-pound female horse heart,

giant with power, heavy with blood.

Don’t you want to believe it?

Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

the huge beating genius machine

that thinks, no, it knows,

it’s going to come in first.

 

—Ada Limón

 

Before

 

No shoes and a glossy

red helmet, I rode

on the back of my dad’s

Harley at seven years old.

Before the divorce.

Before the new apartment.

Before the new marriage.

Before the apple tree.

Before the ceramics in the garbage.

Before the dog’s chain.

Before the koi were all eaten

by the crane. Before the road

between us, there was the road

beneath us, and I was just

big enough not to let go:

Henno Road, creek just below,

rough wind, chicken legs,

and I never knew survival

was like that. If you live,

you look back and beg

for it again, the hazardous

bliss before you know

what you would miss.

 

—Ada Limón