Praise the Earth While It Is Unravelling

I spent Earth Day last Friday at the U.C. Botanical Garden. Glorying in the earth’s bounty that thrives in the San Francisco Bay Area, from redwoods to Chinese medicinal herbs to succulents to carnivorous plants.

A friend who joined me read Drew Dellinger’s poem below. I remember hearing him read Hieroglyphic Stairway years ago at a concert of 2,000 people singing Jennifer Berezan’s Praises to the World. The paradox of climate change catastrophes and climate change deniers-  the impending destruction of so much beauty, the miracles of so much life on the brink of extinction. 

Do spend some time in nature this week. Do spend some time with this poem this week. Do join with others in actions this week, every week, to protect the earth we love, the only earth we have.

Hieroglyphic Stairway by Drew Dellinger

It’s 3:23 in the morning

and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the Planet was plundered?
what did you do when the Earth was unravelling?

surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?

did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?

what did you do
once
you
knew?

I’m riding home on the Colma train
I’ve got the voice of the Milky Way in my dreams

I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry

I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech.

I am the desirous Earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars.

I am everything already lost

the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the Cosmos

I use words to instigate silence

I’m a hieroglyphic stairway
In a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane

a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time

I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea

I’m riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the Milky Way in my dreams
I am the myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods

I’m the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire

it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I can’t sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in my dreams
what did you do while the Earth was unravelling?

I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech.

-Drew Dellinger, Hieroglyphic Stairway in Love Letter To the Milky Way