The Wake

Someone poured a stein for the deceased

and set it on the mantle.
It had warmed but wasn’t flat.
The sun danced off the lake
which should have been ice-covered
but was as bare as the hands
wrapped in a rosary.
Let them wonder that you walked
amongst their grieving
and finished your final beer unfettered.

 For Brendan at Earthweal, poetry for a changing world.

Dust In The Rain Gauge

The fires took four more houses down last night,

your fragile desert landscape up in flames.

They’re miles away, we’re safe, you set me right.

The darkling sky looks like a storm to me.

Your cat just ate a spider and licks his face,

they hide in the darkened corners of your garage.

But still, I watch the sky above our game.

You made a triple word score with a Z

and remind me where we are; it’ll never rain.

People have to have some place to stay

desert rats without the sense to flee

and water is cheap pumped in from far away

to here where fires feed on the dead and leap the pass.

(I tried to feed my X to that hungry three-legged cat)

No looming thunderstorm those kites of black.

You remind me where we are; it’ll never rain.

The fires took four more houses down last night.

I have posted this for Earthweal's first weekly challange: Fire

bearing witness to Earth's changing climate which is escalating beyond the most conservative scientist's expectations. 

A Place Erased

The detour signs led us off the road we knew

and pot holes opened up like sink holes.

Shacks and crooked trailers dotted the road

and the car quieted-

                our children in the back suddenly paying attention.

We’d crossed a border without guards

and entered a country where people sit on porches

and don’t wave.

The road took us deeper into the dappled woods

and curved through hills fit for a travel brochure

but outside the window garbage overflowed the ditch—

            discarded tires and tin cans, shiny pieces

            of broken glass signaling for help.

Dust hung in the air and breached the rolled windows.

Our detour through this country inside a country

made our children put down their games

and ask questions we couldn’t answer.

This poem is my attempt to play "Play It Again" one last time with the prompt from The Imaginary Garden With Real Toads. I selected the challenge issued by Sherry Blue Sky to pen a poem of social commentary.

Also linked to Earthweal a new site dedicated to poetry of a changing earth.

Writers On Writing

As we close the door on 2019 with high hopes for the new decade, I thought I'd share some of my favorite quotes from poets and writers, from Mary Oliver to Elmore Leonard. Good luck with your writing and Happy New Year!

“Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”

 -Mary Oliver

  "Why say very beautiful? Beautiful is enough," said James Joyce, hardly a miser when it came to words.

"A  writer must take infinite pains-if he writes only one great story in his life, that is better than writing a hundred bad ones-and that finally the pains the writer takes must be his own."
 - John Gardner

"You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write."
  -Saul Bellow

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver

"If you’re doing your job, the reader feels what you felt. You don’t have to tell the reader how to feel. No one likes to be told how to feel about something. And if you doubt that, just go ahead. Try and tell someone how to feel."

 -    author unknown
Or..
     As Elmore Leonard said, "the reader  either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care."

"Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life."
  - Barbara Kingsolver

 "The true novelist is the one who doesn't quit, though the rigors of novel-writing generally bring no profit except to the spirit. For those who are  authentically called to the profession, spiritual profits are enough."
   -John Gardner

And, finally, the one that haunts me in the dead of night when sleep eludes me:

"What do you plan to do with your one, wild precious life?"
   -Mary Oliver

For The Small People

Firefly,

Firefly,

fire

fly for me.

Pelican,

brown pelican

of the gulf coast pelicans,

(you were once a postcard pelican)

preen once more for me.

BP CEO sail your yacht

on a pristine sea.

For me.


This post is in response to the challenge on Imaginary Garden with Real Toads to raise our voices for climate justice.

On April 20, 2010 the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. The spill continued for nearly five months until it was finally sealed on Sept 10, 2010.  It is estimated that 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled off the coast of Louisiana, threatening fisheries, wildlife, and beaches along the coastline, including sensitive nesting areas for the brown pelican.

Satellite image of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

When the company's CEO took a day off to go sailing during the height of the disaster, he reportedly referred to those fishermen and others whose livelihood depended on the waters of the Gulf as "Small People".

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, we may not know the full effect of the spill on animals-both big and small-for years to come.

BP is a case study on how much ignoring corporate social responsibility can cost, from both a financial and environmental standpoint. The story of the Zebra Finch relayed to us on The Garden, is a case study for fighting back, and the words of climate activist, Joanna Macy, who has devoted her life to working for climate justice, inspire us all to speak up and take action, however small, as small as the mother Zebra Finch who sings to her unborn chick in the egg, preparing it for life in a changing world.

Amazingly, scientists have observed that chicks sung to in this way emerge smaller than usual, thus better able to withstand a warming environment. In the words of Sherry Blue Sky at the garden, I too see hope in the "young rainbow warriors" arising across the world to fight for the future of planet Earth.

Thank you for reading what I've posted as rain pelts my window on this late December day in wet, soggy out-of-sorts Michigan,

Up To No Good

The Runner

A figure clothed in black

from masked face

to gloved hands

   (snug fit textile)

and cleated boots,

darts by my window.

He would be suspect—

          up to no good

but for the wind chill factor

the snow on the ground.

As is,
he only invokes admiration
as I heat my soup on the stove.