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[with poems from The Ecopoetry Anthology by
Gary Snyder, Evie Shockley, Adrienne Rich]
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For the Children
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The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up as we all
go down.
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In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
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To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:
.
stay together
learn the flowers
go light
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Gary Snyder
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
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❦ ❦ ❦
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In the cook tent behind the Big Top, the carnies are eating breakfast together. One rowdy slurps coffee with the spoon handle jutting up from his cup. His buddy hollers, “You’ll put your eye out!” but he just ignores the danger and goes right on drinking.
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Young Toby Tyler and I just gape, he at the jostling men and me, age eight, at the black & white TV. Both of us are convinced it’s going to happen any minute, spoon into eyeball. No matter what happens during the rest of that movie, we keep watching the guy with the doomed eye.
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Sixty years of foreboding later and I still can’t tell you much else about the film (wasn’t there a chimp?), but it doesn’t take much for me to still feel that gut tug of imminent blinding: the teaspoon of Damocles. “Putting your eye out” was one of the more graphic horrifics that dogged my childhood. When it became the tagline for “A Christmas Story,” I couldn’t laugh with quite the same gusto as my wife. As readers we’re admonished to be vigilant for foreshadowing; as writers we’re taught to incorporate it; as kids we’re just scared into behaving ourselves.
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Turns out the rowdy never even poked his eye. It wasn’t foreshadowing at all, just a one off Disney gag. Can you even call something foreshadowing if it never connects to the unwritten future, if there isn’t some aftshadowing of destiny that confirms the prophesy? Am I trying to tell myself to quit worrying so much about a future that may never arrive? Standing in the TSA line at the airport – oh no, do I have a weapon in my pocket, nail file of Damocles? Dad speeding toward his 95th birthday with driver’s license in his pocket, gleam in his eye, and in his ignition the key of Damocles. What could possibly go wrong?
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Alas, I’m afraid that eight-year old kid already had thinking about, planning for, and worrying about the future inscribed deep in his psyche. In the fable about ants and grasshoppers it never even occurred to him to identify with anyone but the ant. Here I am now, all grown up, carefully rinsing the teaspoon and putting it in the washer. But what the hell: gimme another cuppa coffee!
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❦ ❦ ❦
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notes for the early journey
+++ for j.v.k.
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somewhere along the way you will need to lean
over a bluff’s edge drop you shoes and keep moving use
the feel of greening grass under your feet as a guide if a
rainbow confuses you which end go the third
way on the mountain you’ll remember climb on
up to where the aspens tremble you will be alone these
high winds can knife some lungs to gasping rags but for you
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there’s nothing to worry about breathe sniff the air like
a bloodhound and head the opposite way find the
place where the land dissolves into sand keep walking when
that sand becomes sea speak a bridge into being
I know you can do it your father’s son ain’t
heard of can’t follow the song don’t stop until you’re south
of sorrow and all yo can smell is jasmine I never
once stumbled on such a place hard to say if a brown child
is the last four hundred years has had such
a luscious dream day or night but this is your mother’s
lullaby I know she meant you to sleep sweet
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Evie Shockley
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
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❦ ❦ ❦
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At Christmas we celebrate the past and resolve to be worthy of the present – to give life to the divine presence within our own hearts. At New Year’s we look to the future. In recent years that gaze forward has generally been accompanied by a soto voce “Oh, shit.” Yeah, pretty bleak outlook for 2024: politics, race, climate, war. Party’s over.
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This is the best time to open a book of poetry. Not to escape to some idealized past but to connect to another human being who is also muttering, but who hasn’t yet given up hope. And this is especially the time I open my Ecopoetry Anthology, all hefty 0.9 kg of it. I’ve read many definitions of ecopoetry (as differentiated from nature poetry), some of them requiring thousands of words, but here’s my personal take: poems that observe the world as it is, life and geology and physics without rose-colored glasses; poems that put is in our place in the world, in the literal and figurative connotation of that phrase, no holds barred, no punches pulled; poems that, even in the face of reality, still hold onto hope that we creatures might understand, appreciate, and love every particle of it.
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And each other. Love each other. This is the best time to read a poem, connect with the poet, and connect with every other reader of that poem. Past, present, and future. What the hell: gimme some love and hope!
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❦
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More information on The Ecopoetry Anthology, and where to order, HERE
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❦ ❦ ❦
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What Kind of Times Are These
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There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
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I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t
+++ be fooled,
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
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I won’t tell yo where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light –
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
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And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
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Adrienne Rich
from The Ecopoetry Anthology, edited by Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street; Trinity University Press, San Antonio, TX; © 2013
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Thanks again, Debra. I have come back to this poem year after year. ---B