While our family attend a local Climate Summit for youth, I want to leave you with this poem in honor of Earth Day.
Environmental Awareness: The Right Whale The whale was known as right because it was magnificent with oil, slow and easy to find and slaughter, floating even when dead. But after it was no longer needed for fat, men still hunted the whale for its rich mouth of baleen, harvested for hairbrushes, buggy whips, umbrella ribs, the stays of corsets – vain things designed to mold the female body, sculpt a waist so small a man's hands could meet with ease around it. Crazy, the girls agree, the way those women bought it.
Share your favorite Earth Day poem below.
Great poem! Thanks for sharing it. Here’s mine:
ATLAS by CAROL ANN DUFFY
Give him strength, crouched on one knee in the dark
with the Earth on his back,
balancing the seven seas,
the oceans, five, kneeling
in ruthless, empty, endless space
for grace
of whale, dolphin, sea-lion, shark, seal, fish, every kind
which swarms the waters. Hero.
Hard, too,
heavy to hold, the mountains;
burn of his neck and arms taking the strain-
Andes, Himalayas, Kilimanjaro-
give him strength, he heaves them high
to harvest rain from skies for streams
and rivers, he holds the rivers,
holds the Amazon, Ganges, Nile, hero, hero.
Hired by no-one, heard in a myth only, lonely,
he carries a planet’s weight,
islands and continents,
the billions there, his ears the last to hear
their language, music, gunfire, prayer;
give him strength, strong girth, for elephants,
tigers, snow leopards, polar bears, bees, bats,
the last ounce of a humming-bird.
Broad-backed
in infinite, bleak black,
he bears where Earth is, nowhere,
head bowed, a genuflection to the shouldered dead,
the unborn’s hero, he is love’s lift;
sometimes the moon rolled to his feet, a gift.
Oh, this is a good one! Thank you for sharing it.