Poetry and Interactions

Excerpted from my July 2024 newsletter. 

Poetry

There’s been a massive heat wave in California and it’s been a hot month across the Northern Hemisphere in general. In my wanderings outside, the impacts of climate change are never far from my mind. Sometimes simple observations spark reflections about global phenomena, as in this poem, which was published in my first book, What We Were Born For:

The sea spits back broken things

like softened glass,
hairless plastic doll.
Fragmented rim of once-proud porcelain plate.
Wood scrap reduced to smooth umber edge,
half a cinder block passes for a great, gray stone.

When the sea rises it will not give us back our lives, whole.

It will not give us back the voices of the islanders
or the cove where they fished for thousands of years.
Not the glaciers, already gone,
not the coastal cities built over centuries,
not the heat-stricken grandparents with no air conditioning.
Not the artists, or their murals, or the preschool chalk drawings
swallowed in floodwater.
Not the bleached white reefs once shimmered with fish,
the alpine trees and no higher ground.

There are no far-away lands when the largest forest burns.

When the last library is singed dry,
when it is too hot to grow tomatoes,
who will we be?
What pieces will fasten together our humanity then?

—

I started writing this poem in a rocky cove by the ocean, looking around at the objects lodged between rocks, writing a list of these “left behind objects.” As I considered where they might have come from and when they’d been deposited by the falling tides, I started thinking about sea level rise and felt moved to make an inventory of loss––  losses to come and losses that are happening, and that have happened. While this poem feels tied to grief and loss, confronting the grief and uncertainty through writing a poem left me feeling a little lighter. This is one of the reasons I return to poetry. Even when the subject matter is difficult or sad, I’m transformed through the act of writing about it, which allows me to feel through sadness and grief instead of denying it.

Spotted around the yard: Interactions

My partner and I have filled our garden with drought-tolerant, native plants over the last two years, hoping to lessen our water needs and to support the local ecosystem. Now the plants are tall and large, topped with flowers and seeds in the height of summer. And the garden is bustling! Native bees travel from blossom to blossom in the dusk. The baby quail are back, at least four different families as far as I can tell, scurrying from bush to bush and nibbling on seeds.

One thing I’ve been paying attention to are these interactions–– any two organisms or landscape elements connecting in some way. Two bucks who circulate through the neighborhood munching on whatever’s left of the green grass. The turkeys who catapult high into the redwood tree to roost. The young squirrels munching seed heads of poppies. A wren catching tiny insects for its incessantly begging brood, their calls emanate from the large rosemary plant any time I’m outside. A lizard sharing the shade of a chair with a beetle for a few minutes. And how many interactions I’m not seeing, but think are going on–– the rarely glimpsed skink nestled in the darkest part of the water loving lilies, an owl whose continued presence means they must be eating something.

I can also look around the world and easily inventory sorrows and losses, like in the poem I shared above. Those are important things to consider. But making an inventory of what’s right thriving right outside my door feels like an important practice, too.