Tag: ecopoetry

dear little egg, you’re
going to open your eyes
for the first time in a white
room, not knowing that 
my childhood home is now
underwater. and when 
you are older, i will let
you run in the back yard
without shoes on, but
you will never know the comfort
of sinking into healthy
soil. you will never understand
what it means to make a mark on
the earth that does not hurt
it. 
seven years’ worth of leaves
will still be decaying, and 
i will not know how to explain 
where they came from. 
i will not know how to explain
to you that other beings used to
live here, too, or
that there was once another planet
underneath a green canopy and
in autumn, the skies would 
bathe in fire.

i hope we’ll be living with windmills // a.s.m

do you see the red stamps
underneath your own
on that screen?
dismembered mountains
pay the cost
to save the trees.

what about the wasteland you
leave behind?
a place called home.
we destroy others to destroy
our own: to crash cars 
because we smudge our
fingerprint stamps on screens
while driving.

we kill the mountains in an effort to save the trees // a.sm

lines from the world above 
break the surface of the sky and
shatter into a million stars. 

the north star is a lie.  
it’s a death trap; it will 
hook you, it will make you
bleed. 

don’t you ever wonder where
everyone has gone?
following stars that promise
them something beyond return; 
stars that throw your children’s 
entrails back into the sea. 

soon there will be nothing
but sandy bottoms. 
killing is what will kill us, 
eventually. 
and we will only know this
when it becomes too late.

a letter to the blue fin tuna // a.s.m

i long to be just as the earth, 
knowing words are merely what people say.
i’ve suffered through the pain of birth
only from her to be torn away.

my entire life i’ve yearned
to be near to her beating heart,
with time, with patience i have learned
an open mind is where it starts.  

it seems to us a mystery–
how can we hear our mother talk?
don’t rush through life in such hurry;
she speaks in footsteps as you walk.

all she humbly asks of us:
to look at every living thing,
to see the beauty and genius
 
and feel the joy to her they bring.

an ode to my beautiful mother Earth and all fellow living beings. what a beautiful planet we live on // a.s.m