Tag: earth

What I hope for…

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“What I hope for,” Limón said, “is a sort of soothing. I don’t mean just for humans, but for animals, plants and every living creature.”

— Elisabeth Egan, from “A Poem Hitches a Ride on a Rocket, to Infinity and Beyond.” NASA and the U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón may not be obvious collaborators, but a Jupiter-bound mission helped them find common ground. (NY Times, October 25, 2024)

Notes:

  • Photograph: Europa Clipper Lifts Off From Kennedy Space Center. NASA/Kim Shiflett
  • Listen to Ada Limón read her poem here.
  • In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa by Ada Limón:

    Arching under the night sky inky
    with black expansiveness, we point
    to the planets we know, we

    pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
    we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
    of the universe, expert and evident.

    Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
    the whale song, the songbird singing
    its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

    We are creatures of constant awe,
    curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
    at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

    And it is not darkness that unites us,
    not the cold distance of space, but
    the offering of water, each drop of rain,

    each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
    O second moon, we, too, are made
    of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

    We, too, are made of wonders, of great
    and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
    of a need to call out through the dark.

We belong here, possum and person alike

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The Virginia opossum who has taken to sleeping beneath our family room may likewise have only one surviving baby, but the one we have seen seems to be having a grand time figuring things out. On our trail camera, we see it climbing onto our back deck from time to time. My husband, who likes to sit out in the dark backyard and look at the moon, once heard something stirring at his feet. When he opened the flashlight app on his phone, the young opossum was sniffing a box of crackers that my husband had set on the ground.

I’m not anthropomorphizing here. To understand that we all exist in a magnificent, fragile body, beautiful and vulnerable at once, is not to ascribe human feelings to nonhuman animals. It is only to recognize kinship. We belong here, possum and person alike, robin and wren and rabbit, lizard and mole and armadillo. We all belong here, and what we share as mortal beings is often more than we want to let ourselves understand. We all have overlapping scars.

I think the ever-present threat my wild neighbors live with must tell us something about the nature of joy. The fallen world — peopled by predators and disease and the relentlessness of time, shot through with every kind of suffering — is not the only world. We also dwell in Eden, and every morning the world is trying to renew itself again. Why should we not glory in it, too?

— Margaret Renkl, from “The Nature of Joy” (NY Times, June 26, 2023)

DK Photo of White-Tailed Deer, 5:30 am. June 25, 2023. More photos from morning walk here.

Monday Morning

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The plan is obvious. Earth will become more and more beautiful until I can’t stand it. Then I will vanish.

—  D. Nurkse, from his poem ‘A Clearing on Ruth Island’, published in Sangam House, March 2022

Notes:

  • Photo: DK @ Cove Island Park @ Daybreak. 5:03 am. 59° F. May 30, 2022.  See more photos from today’s glorious morning here.
  • Poem Source: indeskidgepoetry
  • And a final thought…the biggest thought fluttering around (more like cutting) —  today being Memorial Day, a day we remember and honor those who sacrificed everything for our freedoms – – those Patriots who vanished before they were able to see another moment of our Earth’s beauty.  I am grateful for them and honor them today. And perhaps there is a bigger, grander plan, for the wars, for the children slaughtered at elementary schools, for the incomprehensible racist killings at our neighborhood grocery stores – – because I can’t see any plan that includes killing fields in schools and grocery stores.  Thomas Friedman: “But with every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog whistle, every defund-the-police initiative, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, every speaker run off a campus, every bogus claim of election fraud, I wonder if he can bring us back together. I wonder if it’s too late. I fear that we’re going to break something very valuable very soon. And once we break it, it will be gone — and we may never be able to get it back…We are staring into that abyss right now.”

Walking. With a sound we do not hear that lifts the birds off the water.

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I know it’s them. It has to be them. They’re back. The geese that I followed last year.  The Female that nested on the dock. The Male the hovered nearby offering ongoing protection.

I scan through old posts to find that it’s been almost one year to the day, April 11, 2021: “Nest. Where you make it.”

I pull into the park, my eyes hungrily seek them again. It’s been a week now since I’ve spotted them. There’s no nest on the platform. But they swim, quietly, alone, together.  Waiting, I would guess, for the Moment.

Their Moment. Bigger than the madness in Ukraine. Or the toxicity of Washington. Or the gang shootings in Sacramento.

And it’s Ilya Kaminsky from “That Map of Bone and Opened Valves” that seemed to capture how I felt as I stared down at them:

It’s the air.
Something in the air wants us too much.
The earth is still…
On the fourth day I touch the walls,
feel the pulse of the house and I
stare up wordless and do not know why I am alive…
a sound we do not hear
lifts the birds off the water.

Notes:

Lightly Child, Lightly

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Drifting, what am I like?

A gull between earth and sky.

—  Du Fu, (712- 770). “Thoughts While Traveling At Night”, trans. by Vikram Seth, in Three Chinese Poets: Wang Wei, Li Bai, and Du Fu

Notes:

  • Photo – DK @ Cove Island Park on March 21, 2022. Quote via antigonick
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”