I have come to terms with the future.
From this day onward I will walk
easy on the earth. Plant trees. Kill
no living things. Live in harmony with
all creatures. I will restore the earth
where I am. Use no more of its resources
than I need. And listen, listen to what
it is telling me.
Browsing category: Nature
Listening to Helen Caldicott on the Car Radio While Stalled in a Traffic Jam Downtown
I like to drive.
To use electricity, gas, fuel.
To step on a pedal and roar forward,
sixty miles an hour.
I like my car,
little steel womb,
from whose confines I view, if not rule,
the world. I like my radio,
which sings me songs and tells me stories
when I turn it on, and here’s this shrill
Australian woman
yelling, scolding, haranguing.
“My God!” she is saying.
“The trees are your lungs—can’t you see?
They look just like a pair of upside-down lungs.
The rivers and oceans are your arteries,
your blood. The ozone your skin.
Don’t you get it?
The earth is not your mother—it is yourself!”
She is screeching
through the unreal fog of traffic.
I inch forward slowly, sweating.
I could turn her off. With one flick of my wrist.
I am that powerful.
I remember
hearing her speak in a hug auditorium filled with people.
“How many of you,” she asked, in that steel sandpaper voice of hers,
“would die to save the earth?”
Some hands went up.
eMy husband, sitting beside me, raised his.
I could not.
He was crying.
Still I could not.
Driving West
Though the landscape subtly changes,
the mountains are marching in place.
The grasses take on the fading
yellows of the sun,
and cows with their sumptuous eyes
litter the fields as if they had grown there.
We have driven for hours
through bluing shadows,
as if the continent itself leaned west
and we had no choice but to follow the old ruts-
the wagons and horses, the iron snort
of a locomotive. We are the pioneers
of our own histories, drawn
to the horizon as if it waited just for us
the way the young are drawn
to the future, the old to the past.
Back Home
The place I lived as a child, the sharecropper’s farmhouse with
its wind-bent mulberry trees and rusted farm machinery has
completely vanished. Now there’s nothing but plowed fields for
miles in any direction. When I asked around in town no one
remembered the family. No way to verify my story. In fact,
there’s no evidence that any of what I remember actually hap-
pened, or that the people I knew ever existed. There was my
uncle Axel, for instance, who spent most of his life moving from
one job to another, trying to “find himself.” He should have
saved himself the trouble. I moved away from there a long time
ago, when I was a young man, and came to the cold spruce
forests of the north. The place I thought I was
Almanac
My grandparents owned the land,
worked the land, bound
to the earth by seasons of planting
and harvest.
They watched the sky, the habits
of birds, hues of sunset,
the moods of moon and clouds,
the disposition of air.
They inhaled the coming season,
let it brighten their blood
for the work ahead.
Soil sifted through their fingers
imbedded beneath their nails
and this is what they knew;
this rhythm circling the years.
They never left their land;
each in their own time
settled deeper.