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Poem After Earth Day
After Earth Day I Walk into the Dunes
(5 five-line poems)
Goodbye to the Poetry of Earth Day
(w/ accompanying comment and chant)
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Poem After Earth Day None of these poems are good enough the day after Earth Day. I cross a number of seas in my lethal vehicle to get to where hawks and eagles rise and spin in great slow cyclones the dunes send up under the sun even on a cold day. They arrive. They wait here, this congregation of buteos and raptors, to go about their business as if we mean them no harm our little gang of voyeurs with high powered lenses in the chilling wind. Our history of wrecks is all around us, drowned. The water, today an astounding churl of aquamarine, keeps our losses from us. There is another country, over there. It is where these wheels of graceful fliers dancers on the kettles of a wild combination of laws of nature and love wait to be propelled, shot to that other side. I will take a similar journey someday. They become my messengers, up there but they do not care for me, my life or my death, even if I am the author of their massacre. Oh, none of these poems are good enough. The beech trees still sicken and die the tiger’s own fierceness condemns it and the palm oil plantations and gaslands have shaken us, burned below the root, melted the ice fields of our deaths and the future of our dreams. And the future of our dreams… what can we say about the perfect or the terrible in what we see when we sleep? I watch the raptors climb the air, breathless, no gravity in an icy April by the glacial sea. None of it belongs to me—
After Earth Day I Walk into the Dunes (5 Five-line Poems) The sand that stung me at the top of the mother bear is a grit I pull out of my ears and hair hours later. * Something so spectacular erases itself by the hour and all the long ships are chased into safer harbors * So much happiness depends on this trek up a dune to a view of islands and back again * It is hard to believe how far everything is blown! A very old leaf turns and turns, a tree rocks, water cannot possibly be that hue. * Balanced along the knife of a dune I decide to go on that big blowing water always further off than it seems.
Goodbye to the Poetry of Earth Day “I do not even have ashes to rub into my eyes." -- James Wright All the ghosts of the lost beasts hide in the hills even as the forests die and glacial sinks and plowfields are coveted for drill sites and roads. We still hold out for paradise while we pull apart seed heads of rare flowers, undiscovered snakes disappear into the ether, and behemoth beech trees topple in the sparest wind. Ours is such an insidious disease. This is a poem for the days after Earth Day when we go back to business: children are hushed and bundled across our invisible boundaries to escape the ruins of their time to be swept up on the berm by the seas where Odysseus and Aeneas found gods and monsters and lovers to launch their songs: we have the temples to prove it. Even Maimonides, great doctor of the galleries of the sky was forced to wander from one side of the sea to the other because of which side of god he believed and now our gods have compelled us to sunder these waters the ice fields and sedges, fens and larches and bees. Goodbye to the poetry of Earth Day! Shall I climb into my car to spew the arsenic of my children’s children’s grief? We will go on to fight for the wrong things and make our not-so-distant kin roam far from home in baskets crowded with terror over waves of stains, what is left of our greatness where we learned to articulate love. * Comment on "Goodbye to the Poetry of Earth Day" Greater Migrations than These: In the countries where hawks and eagles gather up against the far northern seas, the dunes send up tunnels of heat and swarms of wings careen before a great push (dare we call it god?) navigates their crossing: The broadwing hawk flies wide and strong The redtail banks with each kettling surge The little sharp-shinned hawk is quick and daring The golden eagle leaves its wings up after lifting, a slight ‘V’; in the right light the subtle chevron on its nape shimmers in the sun The bald eagle brings its wings straight across after it climbs and rises Three sandhill cranes bisect a spiral of kettling raptors and continue across Whitefish Bay all the way to Canada * Chant to accompany Goodbye to the Poetry of Earth Day I know that water is everywhere I know it is responsible for air I know that water is everywhere I know it is the reason for earth I know that water is everything. I know that water is home (repeat)
Note: Poetry on Compendium: The Kitchen Sink is best read on a laptop or PC, iPhones scramble line endings and stanzas.
The photographs accompanying these poems were all taken on a very recent trip to Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes. The legend is that a mother bear and her two cubs were crossing Lake Michigan and for a number of reasons the cubs were unable to make the crossing. The mother bear turned to watch her cubs and was transformed into one of the great dunes along the shore, while her cubs were turned into North and South Manitou islands.