Earth Day Poems for Every Day


Photo graphic created wit a program. Foreground, a hand holding the bottom half of the globe, a large green tree growing out of it. Top text "Go green before green goes". Bottom text "World Earth Day". Background soft focus earth and grass.


Every day really is Earth Day. What else could it be? Knowing that, how will you choose to live?

As with all my collections of poetry I've chosen a few lines to excerpt, not necessarily the first lines in the poem. Follow the links to read the full work.

"Earth Day" by Jane Yolen

As long as life,
As dear, as free,
I am the Earth
And the Earth is me. 

"Make the Earth Your Companion" by J. Patrick Lewis

Make the Earth your companion.
Walk lightly on it, as other creatures do.

"Gravity" by Donna Hilbert

This is why we call the earth Mother,
why all rising is a miracle.

"Treat Each Bear" by Gary Lawless

Treat each bear as the last bear.
Each wolf the last, each caribou.
Each track the last track.

"School Prayer" by Diane Ackerman

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,

"For All" by Gary Snyder

I pledge allegiance to the soil
            of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
             one ecosystem
             in diversity
             under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

"Love in a Time of Climate Change" by Craig Santos Perez

I love you as one loves the most vulnerable
species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

"Beginners" by Denise Levertov

-- we have only begun

to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision

how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.

"Untitled [Earth teach me stillness]" by Nancy Wood

Earth teach me caring
    as the mother who secures her young.
Earth teach me courage
    as the tree which stands all alone.

"When the Animals" by Gary Lawless

When the plants speak to us
     in their delicate, beautiful language,
     will we be able to answer them?

"2007, VI [It is hard to have hope]" by Wendell Berry

Because we have not made our lives to fit
our places, the forests are ruined, the fields eroded,
the streams polluted, the mountains overturned. Hope
then to belong to your place by your own knowledge
of what it is that no other place is, and by
your caring for it as you care for no other place, this
place that you belong to though it is not yours,
for it was from the beginning and will be to the end.

"Map" by Linda Hogan

This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.

"Anthropocene: A Dictionary" by Jake Skeets

diyóół        : wind (

                         wind (more of it) more wind as in (to come up)
                         plastic bags driftwood the fence line 

"Makers" by Pamela Alexander 

We dried rivers or dammed them, made
music, treaties, money, promises.
Made more and more of our kind,
which made the cars and the wars
necessary, the droughts and hurricanes.

"Nimbawaadaan Akiing / I Dream a World" by Margaret Noodin

Nimbawaadaan akiing
I dream a world

atemagag biinaagami
of clean water

gete-mitigoog
ancient trees

gaye gwekaanimad
and changing winds.

"Dead Stars" by Ada Limón

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
                 if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

"Mending Mittens" by Larry Schug

Blessed be those who have laced together
the splits at the seams of this world,
repaired its threads of twisted waters.
Blessed be those who stitch together
the animals and the land,
repair the rends in the fabric
of wolf and forest,
of whale and ocean,
of condor and sky.
Blessed be those who are forever fixing
the tear between people and the rest of life

"Testimony" by Rebecca Baggett

I want to say, like Neruda,
that I am waiting for
"a great and common tenderness,"
that I still believe
we are capable of attention,
that anyone who notices the world
must want to save it.
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Reruns: April Posts Worth Revisiting

I'll note that since April is the month people try to complete 30 Days of Biking, I've written a lot of posts in this particular month—in 2014 I committed to a format of 30 rides, 30 words, 30 pictures. I've included examples from 2019 as well as 2014 that wrap up the month and link to all the posts that month; regular blogging to hold myself accountable keeps me on track. Many of them are specific to a time and place so they're not quite as evergreen as the ones I'm sharing here.

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Celebrate National Poetry Month

Photo of a page in a book with text of a poem and author's name. Galway Kinnell' "Prayer": Whatever happens. Whatever *what is* is is what I want. Only that. But that.

As I developed my poetry-reading habit I learned April is National Poetry Month, established in 1996. If you're talking about poetry in social media this month use #NationalPoetryMonth. 

Celebrate April 18 as Poem in Your Pocket Day and spread poetry online, in person, in whatever way strikes your fancy. Maybe one of the poems from my posts here and on my Bike Style blog has become a favorite and you're going to print out copies and give them to people, put them in a Little Free Library, leave one on the table at your favorite coffee shop. 

Or perhaps you're simply going to read some poems. You may end up memorizing one and putting it in your mental pocket to keep, as I have with Galway Kinnell's gem, "Prayer" (follow the link to get a video of the poet performing this):

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Where I find poems

I have a good-sized and growing collection of books by favorite poets (Bookshop.org affiliate collection at the bottom of this post is by no means complete). In my online list of sites I keep adding one more tab to the browser set I keep available. I don't visit every one of these every day; some I do, some I spend time with on a rainy Saturday. Occasionally I go in search of a specific poem referred to in an article and find a whole new collection to work my way through, thanks to the magic of the internet. Some of these I read my way through a while back but they keep growing and I expect to revisit at some point. In addition to this list I sometimes go to the site of a poet who's new to me and read whatever they've made available online.

A Hundred Falling Veils: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer posts a poem every day, which you can subscribe to receive via email as well as reading them on her site. I visit the site for that day's poem and occasionally search the archives on a specific term. I own several of her books, and she led me to the next site on my list.

A Year of Being Here: Curated by Phyllis Cole-Dai, this site offered a mindfulness poem every day for three straight years. I found it long after the project ended and have been reading my way through the site for going on three years myself, each day reading the poems posted on that date. This site led to the publication of Poetry of Presence, which I read during the early days of the pandemic, and Poetry of Presence II.

American Life in Poetry: I'm working my way back through the archives of this project, the result of a long-running project of publishing poems in daily newspapers.

Poetry Foundation: They publish a poem a day along with writing about poetry. I'll admit I far prefer reading poems to reading about poems, English lit college classes notwithstanding.

Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day: Another site with a poem served fresh every day. They often use older poetry that's in the public domain, which I find less appealing than new poetry.

Poetry Society of America: I truly had no idea there were so many nonprofits dedicated to poetry. Here the poems come bundled with essays that I sometimes read, sometimes skip.

Poetrying: An eclectic collection that isn't adding new poems, but holds plenty for me to work back through.

The Far Field: Washington state poet laureate Katherine Flenniken published poems by Washington poets 2012-2014; the archive continues to 2016.

Library of Congress Poetry 180: When Billy Collins served as the national poet laureate he created this set of poems high schools could use to share a poem every schoolday in a typical school calendar year.

Maya Stein 10-line Tuesday: Stein publishes (spoiler alert) a 10-line poem every Tuesday. You can subscribe to receive them via email or work your through them as she posts them online.

Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Poems: British poet Anthony Wilson curated a list of poems he describes as "lifesaving," which he turned into a book of the same name. Describing his approach, he writes, "My criteria were extremely basic.  Was the poem one I could recall having had an immediate experience with from the first moment I read it? In short, did I feel the poem was one I could not do without?" He has other collections and his own work on the site.

Grateful.org: Another collection I think of as based in mindfulness and awareness.

Read a Little Poetry: Collection started in 2005 by poet T. De Los Reyes.

Inward Bound Poetry: Yet another poem collector.

And one I can no longer find, so if this rings a bell drop a link in the comments, please! For a while I was reading my way through a truly international collection of poems curated by an engineer from...India, maybe?... who wrote an essay with each poem talking about its context, the poet's biography, other features. I enjoyed the site and now can't find it in my Google history. Various search attempts bring me nothing but ads assuming I want to publish my own book of poetry and an intriguing set of links that have something to do with engineering poetry, or engineering being like poetry, or poems about engineers.... I'm off on another hunt.

My bike racks, ferry landings, and train stations full of poems

Poetry books on Bookshop.org

If you can afford to buy books I hope you support your local independent bookstore. If you can't, libraries are amazing! And putting in requests for titles supports authors in a way that lets others read their work too. If you want/need to shop online, the Bookshop links below are affiliate links. In the unlikely event I ever receive any commissions from book sales I'll donate those funds to organizations working to make streets and cities safer and more just.


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A Year of Poems: April

Yes, yes, courtesy of T.S. Eliot we know April is the cruelest month, but "The Wasteland" isn't really a poem about April. I think of April as the month with the "shoures soote" (sweet showers), courtesy of having to memorize the opening to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for an English class in college. I remember working carefully at the Middle English pronunciation: SHOW-res SOE-tuh, if I recall.

For those who enjoy official designations of days, weeks and months, this is National Poetry Month, established in 1996. If you're talking about poetry in social media this month use #NationalPoetryMonth. 

A note on format: Curated lists of poems usually list the first few lines as an excerpt. I choose specific lines that may be from some other part of the poem, ones that capture something about the poem that made me choose it.

"The General Prologue" by Geoffrey Chaucer

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

"Just Before April Came" by Carl Sandburg

The snow piles in dark places are gone.
Pools by the railroad tracks shine clear.
The gravel of all shallow places shines.
A white pigeon reels and somersaults.

"April" by Janet Norris Bangs

It's that roustabout born of a fairy mother—
Playfellow month that never grew old,
Cradled in the moon with the wind to brother,
Fed on tempests and sun and cold.

"April 18, 2011" by Richard Katrovas

It is snowing in southwest Michigan.
Such weather is unusual so late.
The trees are squirting buds that advocate
For green profusions that yesterday began
To grunt and poke and strain toward full-blown spring.
Now fleeced, the trees are January stark.

"April 29th" by Alexander F. Bergman

It will be remembered that this day
was beautiful with usual skies,
with constant earth,
with sleep and work and love,
    It was a perfect day for flying kites.

"April Rain Song" by Langston Hughes

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby

"April Rise" by Laurie Lee

Blown bubble-film of blue, the sky wraps round
Weeds of warm light whose every root and rod
Splutters with soapy green, and all the world
Sweats with the bead of summer in its bud.

"April" by Sara Teasdale

The roofs are shining from the rain,
The sparrows twitter as they fly,
And with a windy April grace
The little clouds go by.

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