Earth Day Poems for Every Day

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.

It Beats the Alternative: Poems on Growing Older

I was less conscious of my age and the aging process when I was younger. Now when I stand up I may utter a little "oof", and my ankles make a lot of crackling sounds. (Pro tip: Stand up from your sofa or chair without using your arms to push yourself up. You'll be using, and thus helping to maintain, more of your body's strength. Same goes for getting up from the toilet, for that matter.)

My parents lived into their 90s. One of my grandfathers lived to be 95; my grandmothers lived into their 80s. I feel as if I come from a long-lived line and I've had better nutrition and health care than any of them, so it's not that I'm peering into the grave. But I find that some poems resonate for me now that I imagine I wouldn't have found as relevant at 30 or 40. Some poetry can't be written until you've arrived at that place—maybe all of it! 

Most of these are specific to aging as a woman. US society, with its worship of the taut, the slender, the unattainable, begins to ignore older women unless they're famous enough to rate the cover of AARP's magazine. While freedom from the male gaze brings its own kind of relief, ageism, sexism, ableism, and all the other -isms can make for a foul brew. When someone tries to pour that into my cup, I decline. I am just as much me, myself and I at every age that lies ahead as I was in the years behind me. I have become who I am walking a path I'm still on. 

For the most part these poems celebrate, rather than mourn, the passing of the years. I'm sharing a few lines from each to invite you to explore them in full.

"At Fifty I Am Startled to Find I Am in My Splendor" 
Sandra Cisneros

Not old.
Correction, aged.
Passé? I am but vintage.

"A Face, A Cup" 
Molly Peacock

A break-up,
a mix-up, a wild mistake: these show in a face
like the hairline cracks in an ancient cup.

"At the Moment"
Joyce Sutphen

I thought about the way we’d aged,

how skin fell into wrinkles, how eyes grew
dim; then (of course) my love, I thought of you.

"Days I Delighted in Everything"
Hilda Raz

because surely there was a passage of life where I thought
“These days I delight in everything,” right there in the
present, because they almost all feel like that now,
memory having markered only the outline while evaporating
the inner anxieties of earlier times.

"Senior Discount"
Ali Liebegott

I want to grow old with you.
Old, old.

So old we pad through the supermarket
using the shopping cart as a cane that steadies us.

"Here"
Grace Paley

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

"Doing Water Aerobics in the Senior Living Community with Janie Bird"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

frisky as ducklings, tender as saplings
inside old trunks, joyful
as old women who remember
how good it feels to be buoyant
as geese, resilient as ourselves.

"Hear the Water's Music"
Tere Sievers

There is only one way, aging beauties,
to go down this river,
to hear the water's music over the rocks,

"Midlife"
Julie Cadwallader-Staub

to see
a bend in the river up ahead
and still
say
yes.

"Turning 70"
David Allan Evans

...with my eyes
fiercely wide open, each day seconding Prospero’s
“be cheerful, sir,” and Lao Tzu’s tree bending
in the wind, 

"Starfish"
Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee.

"We Are a River"
William Martin, based on Lao Tzu

Don't accept the modern myths of aging.
You are not declining.
You are not fading away into uselessness.
You are a sage,
a river at its deepest
and most nourishing.

"Still Learning"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

It doesn’t occur to me
to tell her about what will happen.
I flit by as she stays on the wall.
She’ll learn soon enough.

Walking in February: Of Woods and Water

February 2023 brought the opportunity for a weekend getaway to Lake Quinault Lodge in Olympic National Park to celebrate a friend's birthday. Some of the group drove to Montesano with their tandem and solo bicycles and rode the 50 miles from there to the lodge. Others, like those of us healing from a broken wrist who can't cover that much ground by bike right now, drove to the lodge.

As I drove out Friday afternoon, accompanied by the Eagles Live double album, the rain came and went and came again, reminding me with the watery blur and the slapping of my windshield wipers that I was heading into a temperate rain forest. (And, not incidentally, reminding me that I wasn't totally sorry I had to miss the bike ride in the cold grey wetness—cold makes my wrist ache even more.)

Friday dinner and Saturday breakfast meant pleasant socializing with some new acquaintances. We were going to gather again for Saturday dinner, and meanwhile the agenda was wide open for whatever activities appealed. For me, this meant a walk in the woods.

I headed first up the narrow, shoulderless road past the lodge to visit the World's Biggest Sitka Spruce. At 191 feet it's a neck-craning forest giant standing in a spot that felt sad, surrounded by the encroachment of spaces designed for tourists exactly like me. 

I tried to imagine it standing as one among many in a lush, unbroken tree canopy, birds and animals rustling in the brush that no longer grows around its feet, no signage prompting us to go visit other giant trees in the park, no people posing for a picture to put on Facebook.

From there, following the simple paper map available at the lodge, I headed back to the road and across, following the trail to Gatton Creek Falls.

I walked alone on the soft paths, surrounded by so much green! Mosses, mosses everywhere, reminding me of listening to the audiobook of Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer with its rich description of their complex lives, structures, and functions.

Every so often I passed a gigantic stump, quite possibly a mother tree cut down to build the lodge I had slept in the night before. I could not help but say softly, "I'm sorry, Mother." Saplings sprang from each stump to fill the space left behind, fed by their mother's body and watered by the rain falling all around.

I heard a creek chuckling off to one side. A small wooden footbridge provided a place to stop and listen to the water rushing downhill before continuing cautiously across on the slippery wet wood, then on up the hill.

This wasn't a hike to cover lots of ground quickly or get somewhere by a certain time. This was a walk simply to be in the woods. I gazed up, down, around and along the trail. Every minute gave me something to look at.

The very small: Delicate traceries of mosses and baby ferns. 

The very big: Those mother trees, downed logs, and tall trees soaring up, draped in long grey-green beards of Spanish moss. 

The pale: The underside of a patch of lichen, fallen from a trunk or limb above. Perhaps all that sogginess was too much to hold onto? It's so moist, like walking on thick sponges. Weblike masses of another moss shrouding a tree as if I were in Shelob's lair.

The bright: Rusty red maple leaves decaying into the soil, the contrast of a log's interior below the dark bark, pale orange dead ferns.

Life, life everywhere. The full circle, with green springing up from brown, climbing, growing, falling back to become soil again. Walking in woods and water reminding me that this world doesn't require me, or humans, to be whole and beautiful.

The Zen of Fingernails: Giving Up Attachment

I’m obsessively attached to my fingernails. Well, we’re all attached to our fingernails, except for George Clooney in that one scene in Syriana that I totally couldn’t watch.

What I mean is, I really want to have nice fingernails. Long, strong, no peeling layers, worth polishing. Fingernails that lead you to make extra hand gestures when you talk and cradle your coffee cup gracefully, tenderly, with both hands, just so people can notice how pretty they are.

Alas, I am doomed. Although taking calcium did help with the peeling problem that dogged me for years, I just cannot grow out a complete set of 10 good-looking fingernails of the same approximate length and maintain them for more than 24 hours.

Every single time I reach that day, that moment of nirvana where I realize that they’re long and well worth polishing with a pretty color in place of my usual clear protective coat, something happens.

I grate one while making hashbrowns.

I hit our granite countertop straight on and break one.

I’m crocheting and a microsnag gets caught in the yarn and tears just far enough that I can’t file it smooth and save the nail.

Or—in one horrendous accident right before my wedding in July 2007—I actually cut straight across the nail and into the thumb with a knife that slipped, and I wore a bandage through weeks and weeks of growing it out. Nothing says long, strong sexy fingernails like a cartoon character bandage on your thumb. At your wedding.

In a domino effect that never varies, once one goes, the rest start dropping like flies. Nails that were beautifully smooth and strong develop tiny tears down low, close to the cuticle line where it will really hurt like a son of a gun if it catches and tears, so I have to cut the nail back to protect myself. I hit countertops, encounter graters and knives, and lose the length one way or another, usually on at least half of them before the carnage stops.

I cut them all back because I hate that look of mostly long nails and a few short freaks, and start all over again.

My special bonus handicap in this quest for perfection: When I was a kid, maybe 8 or so, I smashed a finger in a solid wood door that was at least two inches thick.

I remember going to yell to my brother Don that Mom said to take out the garbage. In turning away and slamming the heavy door shut, I have no idea how I could catch the middle finger of my left hand in the door so badly that the fingernail was torn off, but I did. (For one thing, I’m right-handed; for another, just one finger, in the middle of the hand? What the--?)

I marched into the kitchen where my mother was washing her hair in the sink (this was before they added a showerhead in the upstairs bathroom in our very old house in the country, outside Lewiston, Idaho). I stuck my bleeding, ravaged finger under her face and said, “Look what I did!” Must have still been in shock, since I wasn’t yet crying from the pain.

The sudden appearance of a bloody stump under her sudsy head gave her such a shock that she couldn’t drive, so the garbage-toting Don had to take us to the hospital. They gave me a shot, sewed the fingernail back on, and told me that if I was lucky I wouldn't lose it completely. There was enough attachment in the nail bed that it did grow back, fortunately.

But I have three little notches around the nail, one on each side and one off-center at the base, where the stitches went in. So that nail is nothing like the rest of my fingernails, and I often develop one of those little microtears at the site of one of the side stitches.

Through the luck of the genetic draw I have tapered fingers and nice oval fingernails—except for Mr. Blight on my left hand. That door-slamming accident cost me a lucrative career as a hand model, I’m quite sure of it.

In a weird Lamarckian coincidence, my mother also had a childhood accident that smashed the middle finger on her left hand and ruined the nail. In her case she was behind a rocking chair when her visiting grandmother rocked back and mooshed her finger.

Mom’s quest for beautiful fingernails led her to various failed attempts in the early days of acrylic nails, leading to a nasty nail fungus and terribly weak, soft fingernails that she had to leave unpolished for a long time. She’s now back to fake nails, I notice when I visit her in the dementia facility; someone comes in and does the nails for the ladies who still have enough cognition for vanity.

I never went the fake route. It’s my own nails that I want to have as a thing of beauty and a joy forever. For over thirty years I have sought fingernail perfection, and my nails have fallen short.

The origin of suffering is attachment: one of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. In life all is transient; nothing lasts forever. Because the objects of our attachment are transient, loss is inevitable. Thus I suffer because my long fingernails are inevitably temporary adornments.

When the day comes that I let go of my attachment to fingernail perfection, and the accompanying suffering over the snags and chips of daily life, it will be a sign that I have grown spiritually.

Or that I have finally gotten acrylic nails.