|
Endangered Places
Eight of us were to
meet on peace
green slopes of the Irish Hills that morning
to paint with words our first plein air poems
exploring endangered places
that enchant our individual inner spaces.
Instead, I steered a wheelchair
bearing my shrunken 92-year-old
mother-in-love into a small
hospital room in the Eastern
High Sierra and stopped beside the bed
where her husband laid trapped
in the menace-filled grip of pneumonia.
They clutched each other with terror
and murmured desperate endearments.
In the light of his
father’s
pure white hair
My husband and I suddenly recalled him,
fifty years before, recounting
how he’d driven a street sweeper
through Bishop streets’ dark pre-dawn hours
wearing a radiation-measuring badge,
struck dumb by the sky’s spreading
scarlet scream echoing across the eerily
silent desert from an underground
nuclear test somewhere near Las Vegas.
Everywhere endangered places,
everywhere bewildered inner spaces,
from where again and again, spellbound by
our own unconsciousness, myopia, and ignorance,
we continue to make crucial choices
that shape with such sweeping change
the only world we know.
Environmental
Impact Report
In a strange
afternoon stillness
belying the traffic stream nearby
a snowy egret sleek in flight
evades containment
soars
over tall chain link fence
topped with two rows
of barbed wire that separates
the soft hem of shamrock green hills
from stucco box stores bordered
by parking lots upon rolling parking lots
In a strange afternoon stillness
chaparral oaks and eucalyptus trees
stir sway and murmur on the slopes
like women at a sale table in store below
with brows rumpled by deliberation
In stillness the hills speak:
You are the stuff of your choices
You eat them
wear them drive them
live them
are defeated or empowered by them
With the chisel and hammer of our choices
We re-sculpt our world
|
Questions in a Time of Drought
Birdsong vies with
traffic noise.
Fresh after-rain scent
sweetens autumn air
along the nearby creek,
its rich riparian shawl
narrow here,
wide there.
Thirsty independent
female,
Gaia, lapped up last night’s rain
leaving creek bed still dry.
She dares land-obsessed
owners, developers, and realtors
to reach agreement;
What is a reasonable
and realistic hold-back
to keep homes safe
and support property rights
while generous enough
to sustain wildlife habitat
and natural beauty
to honor Gaia
and nourish our souls?
Are we awake? Aware?
And do we care?
Respite
This willow circle,
golden with solitude,
draws me back
and back
into its womb,
throbbing its surf-song
heartbeat
faintly in my ears,
enclosing me in
green-leaf peace.
Above
warblers and hummingbirds
brushed with sun
flit like luminous thoughts
of what will be
if I retreat
here a while
before being born again
into the world.
|
