Earth Day Verse—National Poetry Month 2020

Perhaps a futile wish on a not-at-all-happy Earth Day.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day in 1970.  Millions of people should be in the streets around the world demanding immediate action to combat global climate change—a militant all-ages extension of Greta Thunberg’s youth-let Students Strike for Peace.  In the United States, Brazil, Bolivia and a handful of other countries the protests should be aimed at the downfall of anti-science climate change denying regimes led by neo and not so neo fascist would-be dictators over turning decades of environmental protections at the behest of shadowy oligarchs.

Instead the streets are eerily empty.  They bring to mind the shots of post-nuclear war dead and vacant cities destroyed not by blasts but by world girdling fallout in the 1959 film On the Beach. 

The deserted streets of a post-apocalyptic world from the 1959 film On the Beach.

In this country the only ones taking to the streets are the collections of Trumpista true believers, gun-toting patriots/neo-nazi militias, and general yahoos storming state capitols demanding the right to spread a deadly plague as the #RealDonaldTrump exhorts them to “Liberate” Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia.  They represent only a sliver of the population enduring stoically, for the most part, the isolation of shelter-in-place orders amid the mounting death of the Coronavirus pandemic.  But in the absence of any alternative voices in the streets save a few exhausted nurses and front line health workers, the media magnifies the significance and power of the astroturf mobs.

How can the rest of us keep Earth Day and what it represents this year?  Erupting on social media, flooding Congressional phone lines?  Standing in our yards or on urban balconies banging pots and yelling our fool heads off?  Desperately organizing for what might well be the last election of a dying democracy?  I don’t know, but we damn well better do something!

Ironically the global lock-down which has brought economies to a screeching halt have turned out to be, as one commentator on one of my posts wrote, a virtual General Strike.  And it has shown in remarkably fast time how quickly the environment can recover.  The skies over China’s bustling cities were smog-free for the first time in decades.  The mighty Himalayas were once again visible from deep in India. green-house gas emissions plummeted.  Rivers ran clearer and oceans were spared new oil slicks.  The planet has begun to heal itself before our eyes.

When inevitably the pandemic subsides will we revert unchanged to the heedless pursuit of growth, short-term profit and environmental exploitation or will we take a moment to learn what we can live without and give a slim chance for that healing to continue?

Earth Day 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 earlier conservationism 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.

And, of course, much was accomplished—the EPA 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 enabled by the Wrecker-in-Chief who has thrown 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 promotes increase carbon emissions from dirty coal and petroleum while attacking renewable energy like those cancer causing windmills.

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 disaster 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 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. 

Susan Jarvis Bryant

Susan Jarvis Bryant is a poet originally from Kent, England and now lives in Texas with her American husband.  She has published in United Kingdom webzines, Lighten Up Online and Snakeskin, and in Openings, anthologies of verse by Open University Poet.  This selection appeared on The Society of Classical Poets web page.

Earth Day 2020

I won’t drive my car, book a flight on a plane;

I won’t take a cab or a trip on a train.

I’ll shun fun beach picnics, each sea turtle’s nose

is safe from the peril my soda straws pose.

I won’t bless my butt with an angel-wing zing;

the scourge of compostable leaves is my thing.

I’ll rein in wild snorts with a mask; I’ll be spurred

to gallop away from the rest of the herd.

I won’t feast on meat, that sweet treat’s out of reach;

I’ll choke down raw beets and the odd garden leech.

I’ll mope here in blackness in blue Wu-Flu-ville;

there’s no hope in hell that I’ll pay my light bill.

I’m saving the earth, let the planet rejoice;

I’m Eco-Boudicca—I’ve no bloody choice!

—Susan Jarvis Bryant

Sam Illingworth.

Sam Illingworth is a Senior Lecturer in Science Communication. His research is concerned with trying to engage and empower people with science, especially those without a voice. He writes science poems to try and communicate some of the beautiful and important scientific research that is being done on a daily basis, all across the world.

An Entanglement of Whales

Basking in the tainted gloss

of west coast rays,

these once frigid water

overflow with sustenance,

enticing anchovies to

cavort along the coastlines;

their corporeal writhing

a carnal call to

hungry, ancient giants.

           Upstream, waves of heat

weave blobs of warmth

into toxic bouquets,

their ghastly aromas

leeching beneath the

burly exteriors of

Californian crabs,

as grounded vessels

delay the inevitability

of their passing.

Warming waves and

contaminated crabs

convene to form

a Venn diagram of

overlapping misfortune;

tugging at the ropes to

release our captives,

we forget the shackles

that pull them ever

downwards

towards the ocean floor.

—Sam Illingworth

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner.

Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is a poet from the Marshall Islands who addressed the UN Climate Summit in 2014.  She reflects on the effects of climate change on her country, as well as the similar effects on Minnesota. She considers the future of the planet and the legacies we will leave to our children.

Utilomar

I dreamt of a dead shark

we were at a family party

my mother asked me to check the oven and

when I opened it

there it was

massive, gray leathered skin, jaw open

like a metal trap

I dreamt of eating a shark

When I woke up I met my mother in the hallway

I told her about my dream

how it felt

foreboding

together we went outside and that’s when we found

the world

flooded

Water

everywhere

Our neighbors wandering outside

morning daze on their faces

homes inundated, families evacuated

sent to sleep on classroom floors at the nearby elementary school

My family is a descendant of the RiPako clan, the Shark clan

known to control the waves with roro, chants

it was said that they turned the tides with the sound of their voice

they sang songs to sharks encircling their canoes, we were connected

to these white tipped slick bodied ancestors carving

through water

we would never

have eaten them

In the Marshall Islands I teach Pacific Literature

Together we read the stories our ancestors told around coconut husk fire

So what are the legends

we tell ourselves today?

What songs are we throwing into the fire . . . what

are we burning?

And will future generations

recite these stories by heart, hand

over chest?

Maybe

In one legend

It’ll start by saying

in the beginning

was water

water from the sea that flooded our homes our land and now

our only underground reservoir

what we call a fresh water lens

shaped like the front of an eyeball, nestled deep in our coral

feeding on rainwater it watches us, burning and angry it is

vindictive

it poisons us

with salt

and thirsty

Over 6,000 miles away from my island home is the US state of Minnesota

I’ve read that Minnesota, like the Marshalls,

is simultaneously drowning and thirsting

In 2007 24 Minnesota counties received drought designation

While 7 counties were declared flood disasters

In 2012 this time 55 Minnesota counties received drought designation

while 11 counties declared flood emergencies

Climate scientists warn of intensified heat

this heat threatens Minnesota’s great North Woods

a forest nearly 12,000 years old

scientists predict the mixed hardwood and conifer forest

will follow glaciers and retreat north by as much as 300 miles in the next century

I imagine a hardwood tree ancient

and weary, dry

untangling its roots from the soil

before heaving its tree trunk body

to a new home where it will forever mourn

its roots

In this legend,

identify the theme, the moral the message what

have we learned . . .

have we learned

anything?

What is the archetype of a monster and a hero?

can they be one and the same?

Here’s another story of a tree

On one of our atolls known as Kwajelein

There was said to be a flowering tree at the south end

that grew from the reef itself

a utilomar tree

it was said its magical white petals fell

into the water and bloomed

into flying fish

On a lazy Sunday my cousin and I lay side by side

on my aunty’s veranda, sun drying our skin, together

we dreamed an organization dedicated to young people like us

who leapt

blind and joyful

into water

willing ourselves wings

to fly

who dared to dream of a world where both forests and islands

stay rooted

who believe that this world

is worth fighting for

I still nightmare of dead leather sharks

But I’d rather dream

I’d rather imagine our/next generation

their voices turning the tides

how our underground reservoir will drink in their chants

how they will speak shark songs and fluent fish

how they

will leap

petal-soft

beautiful

unafraid

into the water

before blossoming

to fly

—Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

Fire and Flood.

And finally another from that annoying  Old Man.

The Fire Next Time is Now

August 27, 2019

For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

           —2 Peter 3: 5-7  The Bible New King James Version

Okay, so Biblical Prophecy is not my thing.

Mumbo-jumbo, mystic-tristick bullshit.

It gives me a rash and a headache.

But this creeps me out, you know?

            Cripes look at the headlines! 

                        Record Heat Wave Feeds Massive Australian Bush Fires

                        Wildfires Permanently Alter Alaska’s Forest Composition

                        Huge Wildfires in the Arctic and Far North Send a Planetary Warning

                        Siberia is Burning!

                        Lungs of the World Ablaze in the Amazon

                        More Fires Now Burning in Angola, Congo Than Amazon.

Maybe Peter, or whoever wrote in his name,

            was onto something after all.

            I don’t know exactly who is un-godly

—me probably, you maybe, 

those guys over there,

but maybe the day of judgement and perdition

is on us all after all.

We failed somehow despite the warnings

            of a thousand prophets, Jeremiahs, and Cassandras

            who warned us over and over

            to do something before it’s too late.

Is it too late really?  We beg for answers from the Holy seers.

            Hear our plea

                        Al Gore

                        Neil deGrasse Tyson 

                        Gagged scientists of NOAA and NASA

            Greta Thunberg  and your children’s crusade.

                        Elders of the Alaskan Nunakauyarmiut Tribe

Can we wake up, you know, like Scrooge on Christmas morning

            fresh and new, our eyes wide open 

            and throw open the shutters to buy the world

            a turkey and a second chance?

Probably not that easy.

But you know what’s worse?

            That Bible guy said no flood this time,

            but he was wrong—

            the oceans rise, the world sinks

            Fire and Flood

                        Fire and Flood

                                    Fire and Flood.

—Patrick Murfin

Late 20th Century Irish-American Women Poets—National Poetry Month 2020

Last October my wife Kathy and I spent a splendid Saturday at one of our favorite spots, the Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago. The occasion was the annual Irish Book, Arts, Music Festival (iBAM).  We enjoyed some fine music, attended a couple of fascinating lectures, browsed exhibits by authors, artists, and artisans, enjoyed some Jameson’s and Harp at the Fifth Province Pub, and endured some Irish cuisine that was about as good as you would expect.  We picked up a couple of author autographed books and a CD or two.  But the bonus for the day the Center’s library sale—surplus books for just one dollar each including a like-new hardback copy of Gerhard Herm’s The Celts and a slender gem, Unlacing: Ten Irish American Women Poets edited by Patricia Monaghan from Fireweed Press, Fairbanks, Alaska in 1987.

The title was a wink-and-nod to an old term for Irish Americans of a certain level of respectability—lace curtain Irish.  Some of the poets had published collections, others had work culled from literary magazines.  None were particularly well known when the book was published and are more obscure today.  They included both immigrants and second or third generations assimilated but yearning to connect with lost roots or struggling against the conventions and expectations of the new world.  They were young, old, and in-between; radical, pro-Irish Republicans or surprisingly apolitical, dutiful wives and sexually liberated rebels; urban as a late bus or caught up in nature and the new ecology movement; faithful Catholics, lapsed one and those seeking to connect with an ancient pagan tradition.

Monaghan revealed scant information about any of them in her brief introduction preferring for the poets to reveal themselves in their verses.

The collection reflects the turbulent times in which it was assembled—The Troubles back in the old country, American urban unrest, rising environmentalism, post-Pill and pre-AIDS sexual liberation, and above all feminism.

In her introduction Monaghan also took on how Irish women writers had been marginalized.

When the Irish-American literary tradition is charted, it looks like a pub in the old country.  Finley Peter Dunne is there, and James Farrell with him.  Eugene O’Neill drops in as does F. Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara.  A couple of the new lads—William Kennedy, John Gregory Dunne—make a showing.  It’s a place for the boys to get away from the world of women, and where a woman who shows her head outside a “snug” is no lady.

On special occasions Mary McCarthy is let in for a round, or Kay Boyle, or Mary Gordon.  But the image of the Irish-American writer as a hard-drinking, priest and mother-ridden puer deterna doesn’t leave much room for them or other of our sex.  Irish-American poets find no acknowledged tradition here from which to draw.

Now let’s turn to a few of her choice picks.

Margaret Blanchard.

Margaret Blanchard has published six novels, two books of poetry, and three books on intuition. She is now a Professor Emerita of Graduate Studies living in Montpelier, Vermont.

The Convent, 1900: Eileen’s Choice

I’m sorry, so sorry, dear

lord, I cannot follow 

your call, as the sheep 

and the shepherd.  More like the fox

we tried once to tame,

I long to rush into the woods 

without even a glance 

back at the rigid

bars, pin-hole

vistas, constraining

rules which trap me here.

Fled is the simple 

faith which led

me along this narrow way,

went across the plains,

where one got lost forever

if she strayed.

Please don’t abandon

me now as I forsake

you holiest path.  The woods

are full if threats:

excommunication if they

forbid me to leave; the shame of

my family; the cage of

spinsterhood or the restraints

of marriage, the pit

of heathenism.

Like an unblazed trail, the path out

is crooked, steep.  One slip,

far from this comfortable

prison, and I could fall

to even worse: the mire 

of lost souls.

            Holy Mary, don’t

let them cast me out

of our mother the Church.

Please don’t let

this be a mistake

I’ll live the rest

Of my days regretting.

Soon I must choose.

I don’t care it’s never 

been done before; it’s the first

and only time for me too.

Once we’ve embraced the future 

as she leaves her touch on us.

As the century 

turns, for better or

worse, I begin to move.

—Margaret Blanchard

Tess Gallagher in the 1970's.

Tess Gallagher was born into a logging family in 1943 and stayed in that area most of her life.  She is poet, essayist, short story writer who studied with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington.  Her honors include a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts award, and the Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.  This poem is from her collection Under the Stars published by Graywolf Press in 1978.

Conversation with a Fireman from Brooklyn

He offers, between planes,

to buy me a drink.  I’ve never talked

to a fireman before, not on from Brooklyn

anyway.  Okay.  Fine I say.  Somehow

the subject is bound to come up, women 

firefighters, and since I’m 

a woman and he’s a fireman, between

the two of us, we know something

about the subject.  Already

he’s telling me he doesn’t mind

women firefighters, but what 

they look like

after fighting a fire, well

they lose all respect.  He’s sorry, but

he looks at them,

covered with cinders of someone’s

lost hope, and he feels disgust, they

are sweaty and stinking, just like 

him, of course, but not the woman

he wants, you get me? And come to that—

isn’t it too bad, to be despised

for what you do to prove yourself

among men

who want to love you, to love you,

love you.

—Tess Gallagher

Patricia Monaghan

Finally one from Monaghan herself who was born in 1946 on Long Island into an extended family was a poet, a writer, a spiritual activist, and an influential figure in the contemporary women’s spirituality movement. She wrote over 20 books on a range of topics including Goddess spirituality, earth spirituality, Celtic mythology, the landscape of Ireland, and techniques of meditation. In 1979, she published the first encyclopedia of female divinities, a book which has remained steadily in print since then and was republished in 2009 in a two volume set as The Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines.  She died in 2012 at age 56.

In County Mayo

The turf settles as we again assign

blame for the unfathomable, cousins

in a house perishing with loss: sons

poisoned or dead, the border at hand,

a war at the table, wounded mother,

father poisoned with clarity.  My left

leg scalds from the blaze, my right

is numb from a doorway breeze.

It is one a.m.  Hot and damp in a crowded

bedroom, Ita coughs and calls from 

the other bed. Over here, secret forces

evade the grip of security police;

there is a plot to overthrow

the government and counter attempts

to unmask sixteen conspirators.

These dreams are as familiar as cousins

and jumprope rhymes, and strange

as an old land finally visited.

It was too easy when I said

there were things I might die for

but I did not know if I could kill.

The dreams, the dreams.  This split

island and its wars, grandfather

songs, glory-o, glory-o and

cousin’s stories late at night.

—Patricia Monaghan