Thursday, June 23, 2022

A New Poem: The World of Our Making

A few weeks ago I attended Deena Metzger's Writers' Intensive.  Once again, a profound week with a wonderful group of writers.  The intensive does not focus on writing poetry, but rather on stories.  Still, one poem came in response to the poem I received at the beginning of intensive, something to contemplate and consider.  I may blog some of the personal story I wrote about later, but in any case, here is the poem.

This summer,

water use in our dry

northern California

will be restricted.

My little pomegranate tree,

only two years old,

just burst out with three deep red flowers.

Last year the tiny fruit fell off, too heavy

for spindly young branches to bear.

I don’t want the baby tree to die

from lack of water, so I will

catch shower-heating water in a bucket

and save the liquid from steaming artichokes

to dribble onto the dry soil.

 

The rains do not come, cannot come.

No rain to evoke sadness

or a flow of memories, but sadness

and the ghosts of memories arrive.

What comes from the sky is dust,

what water arrives is in our eyes.

Looking up for omens and comets,

we struggle to see, to hear something,

to wait for a message, to change.

And still, I love the earth.

The earth Is not the world.

The world of drought and fire,

floods and reckless storms

is of our making.

Our tears are salty and insufficient.

The blown dust and ash clog our eyes.

Yet despite all the horror, all the brokenness,

the redwoods and pines draw up

and display their good green life.

The earth still and always reminds us

to keep on, to love anyway,

to sit down with our ancestors’ ghosts,

to keep telling the stories.

The earth has everything, bears everything –

us, the trees, the life-giving waters,

the myriad other beings.

With all that we have done to her,

can we do any less?