Experiencing Nature and the Earth with “Earth Song” by Sara Barkat

Do you know where you were on April 22, 1970? 

On a warm April Wednesday, I was on the parade ground at Louisiana State University, sitting in the grass with about a thousand other people. We were part of the first nationwide Earth Day, inspired in part by the infamous Santa Barbara oil spill the year before. We listened to speeches and music, we signed petitions, and we chanted slogans. We knew we had become something larger than ourselves, and we knew that college and high school students all over the country were doing exactly what we were doing.

 

I also got sunburned. 

 

Four days earlier, on April 18, poet Allen Ginsburg participated in what may have been one for the first Earth Day poetry readings. At Sr. Generosity’s in New York City, Ginsberg and two other poets read Earth Day poetry. Ginsberg’s reading, apparently, included chanting along with Hare Krishnas. 

 

Earth Day 1970 witnessed the birth of the national environmental movement, bringing together a number of disparate streams of concern that had been building over the previous decade. Twenty years later, in 1990, Earth Day went global.

 

More than 50 years after that first Earth Day, we’re still concerned about the planet. We’re still observing Earth Day. National governments have made the environment a special area of focus. 

 

And we’re still reading, and writing, poetry about the earth. It turns out we’ve been doing that far longer than Earth Day 1970.

 

Writer, artist, book illustrator, dancer, and medieval armorist Sara Barkat has edited a collection of 93 poems about the earth or some facet of it. Earth Song: a nature poems experience includes poems well-known and not-so-well-known. It includes poets who are household words and poets who are striving to be household words. It includes poems you might expect and some you don’t. And it surprises: I didn’t know, for example, that novelist Louise Erdrich also wrote poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

My quarter acre

Forty-nine years ago: I stood

and sat on the university’s

parade ground to listen 

to speeches and presentations 

and wander around booths

and demonstrations.

What I remember: the sunburn.

Forty-nine years later: my patch

of earth is about a quarter acre

leveled down six feet to solid clay

(with zero organic matter)

and first called a lot, then gradually

changed with mulch and leaves

and organic stuff and topsoil and

cow manure and various additions

to manage the pH. Slowly it all

reassembled itself into soil. 

Things grew. 

Things still grow.

Except for dogwoods.

I killed more dogwoods than

I could count and finally gave up,

content to watch the neighbor’s dogwood

flourish across the street.

Clay became soil became gardens and

grass, which retreated as gardens grew.

Of the 63 rose bushes, four survived 

rose rosette disease. Bulbs came and

went; some stayed, bless their hearts.

Somewhere along the way I fell in love

with coleus and hostas, annual and

perennial.

What I learned: taking care 

of your quarter acre is hard work,

not unlike taking care of earth.

What I also learned: you have 

to keep at it, over and over and 

over.

During April, the editors of Tweetspeak Poetry have been hosting a 30-Day, 30-Poem Challenge for Earth Month entitled, appropriately enough, Poetic Earth Month. Today, the featured (and final) poem is an excerpt from Neruda’s Memoirs: Poems by Maureen Doallas. The poetry prompt is to wrote a poem about the making of you as a poet who cares about earth, self, and others.

At the center of the earth

He stood at the center

of the earth, knowing

it could not would not

hold, dust returning

to dust, even then seeing

the rock turning to sand

stones singing a dirge

to mourn what was

no longer is what

could not would not

hold at the center

of the earth.

Photograph by Dario Sabio via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.