Poetry and the Environment: Are You Awakened Yet?

Yesterday’s and today’s posts present a personal challenge to me because I feel so strongly about environmental issues. Like Romantic authors of the past, I care about what is going on in society. I enjoy progress, but ONLY when the motivation is win-win for humans and nature.

If you don’t yet get it, we CANNOT wholesale destroy nature on contrived rationalizations of politicians, scientists, lobbyists, and mega corporations. If nature is being destroyed to the point of non-renewability, they are all, every one, wrong. I hope my poem helps folks to think about that, because engineers and scientists would have guaranteed the Deepwater Horizon rig was safe.

The Moon at Half Mast (completed)
She, Moon, could not respond with frenetic action,
Like that which she viewed with her silvery face
Of the buzzing clean-up engaged in by tiny man.
She could only do three things --
Two of which she performs rather flawlessly
And the third she awkwardly and silently conveys;
Faithfully, she uses her mass and orbit
To keep this globe, our globe,
On its crucial twenty-three-and-a-half degree axis,
And she then uses those same attributes, her attributes,
To steadily, faithfully, and effortlessly urge the sea tides
To ebb and flow.
Neither natural nor effortless, though,
Are the silent sobs with which she now convulses,
Expressing the destruction and loss which people, we people,
Have caused her to witness;
She now wails and laments:
Wails over the brown unsightly blobs
Bobbing over the face of the surging blue sea;
Laments the answering, oily sheen
To the flawless silver radiation she casts in beauty;
Wails for the tiny shelled creatures and wavy, curly sea grasses
Now gasping poisoned breaths;
Laments the powdery white shores
Now pock-marked brown and gummy;
Wails over the majestic pelicans, gulls, osprey, heron
And every sea bird that gently communes with her --
All those, threatened now with a greasy, flightless end
Or a perplexing, gnawing hunger;
Laments the little fish, the dolphins, the turtles,
The rays, the crustaceans — so many creatures --
Puzzled at the noxious, smothering net
Now enclosing and settling upon them, around them --
The cycle of life disrupted by this unnatural death.
And through the salty and now oily tears
Of her devastated domain she cries with the cadence of her waves,
“Not I, Not I, Not I, Not I
Did this, Did this, Did this, Did this!”
And the waves answer,
“Who did, Who did, Who did, Who did?”
And what do we, we humans, say?
Moon glows at half mast over the sea.

Questions and Thoughts
Do alternatives to fossil fuels exist? What are the possibilities? If we have learned anything, we should know that the destruction of nature, no matter how justified, results in untold future disaster. What does nature teach us, show us? Are we blind, having eyes to see? Are we reduced to making moral, ethical, societal, and governmental judgment calls based on a few bucks in our individual pockets? I hope not, sincerely hope not. I hope that we care for things beyond ourselves; if we don’t, then we don’t deserve to escape the consequences of shortsighted greed.

​Tomorrow, I will deal with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and a few other thoughts, including fracking.

EnvironmentSelf-awarenessPoetry