The Least of These

By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, NC, USA Hokusai painted them, Issa wrote about them, and Mao did his best to exterminate them.  It’s true that Eurasian tree sparrows gorge themselves on spilled grain.  So, during the Great Leap Forward, the Four Pests Campaign encouraged schoolchildren to kill as many sparrows as they could, tearing up nests and smashing eggs. People beat pots and gongs to drive them from their roosts until the birds dropped from exhaustion.  A billion sparrows died. With few birds left to eat them, hungry locusts swarmed through grain fields and rice paddies. Upwards of forty million people…

Murky Lake

By Theresa CancroWilmington, Delaware, USA murky lake . . .long tears cloudthe buffalo's eye

The Intruder

By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, North Carolina, USAA glimpse of white wing bars, half hidden among juniper and honeysuckle. Uncertain, I find a picture on my phone and the app plays several notes of a song. At once a tiny being—no more than a quarter of an ounce—confronts me, scolding loudly, warning me away from a world that belongs to him.  sunlit hedgerow—the kinglet revealshis ruby crown

All of Us

By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, North Carolina, USA all of usfrom blowfly to blue whalebirthright citizensof a dying planet . . .who will have the last word?

Gas lit

By Melissa DennisonBradford, Yorkshire, England From boreal forests in the Arctic Circle to Hawaii and Malibu, every year more and more of our planet is burning. fanning the flames deniers of climate change

Lipstick

By Florence HeyhoeCounty Down, Northern Ireland lipstick —the cosmetic trade flaying donkeys Further reading: End the Donkey Skin Trade

The Urge

By Rebecca DrouilhetPicayune, Mississippi, USA the urgeto flow beyond my banks . . .a drop of waterlonging to gowhere oceans rise and fall

Early Dusk

By John PappasBoston, Massachusetts, USA early dusk reaching into the warren winter’s chill

Late October

By: Steve Van AllenCincinnati, Ohio, USA, Earth global warming?a beautiful spring daylate October

The Blue Dot

By Bryan D. CookOrleans, Ontario, Canada Cloaked from earthling sight, two extraterrestrial fortune hunters gaze down at planet Earth. “Which bit do you want?” “I’d take the blue stuff but it’s so full of plastics that I’ll pass. How about you?” “ I’d take the green-brown stuff but it’s overrun with pillaging apes. I’ll pass too.” “ Let’s go find another trophy world and leave this one’s sun to evaporate away its atmosphere.”  “O.K., pity though, it looked like such a precious blue gem on the trajector screen!” ocean highwaytoo fast and busyfor humpbacks

Oriental Plane 

By Diana WebbLeatherhead, Surrey, UK It towers above the park this tree . An ancient haven with countless generations of birds to its name.  It teems with wildlife down through its roots. Painters have painted it, poets penned poems on it, children danced and sang round the girth of its trunk.  Now there are plans for this space with a landmark. High rise tower blocks. Multi-story car park. Big hotel. Lots and lots and lots of concrete which will always resound with the multi-wave echo of the crash of a tree.  layered picnic rugwith shade of myriad summerswe shake out the tears

Faint Aurora

By Theresa A. CancroWilmington, Delaware, USA faint aurora  . . .a polar bear clambersonto the shrinking floe

Crude

Theresa A. CancroWilmington, Delaware, USA unmixed oil slicks press against dolphin skin fall leaves…a plastic bag gapeswide as Texas First published in The Other Bunny, June 11, 2018

Broken Bottle

By Theresa A. CancroWilmington, Delaware, USA broken bottleat the end of the pathblue-eyed grass First published in Plum Tree Tavern, 2015

Crack of Dawn

By Theresa A. CancroWilmington, Delaware, USA crack of dawn —fireflies escapethe jar First published in Chrysanthemum #18, 2015

Anthropocene

By Steve Van AllenCincinnati, Ohio, USA, Earth hawaiian honeycreeper guam flying fox bachman's warbler yellow blossom pearlymussel scioto mad tom mariana fruit bat           Gone forever plasticpollutionlogging drilling hate asphalt microplastics cancer            Cannot leave soon enough butterfly the only thing movingthis hot afternoon 

The Nature of Falling

By Rebecca DrouilhetPicayune, MS, USA Sometimes I still dream of those two old oaks on my grandparent’s old farm. Lightning hit one of them first and then years later, the other. They seemed to be potent symbols of my grandparents, who, ending their last days, were also ending the era of noble peasants tending rural farms. In this era of asphalt and progress, multi-lane highways dominate the landscape. Who remembers a barn full of half-wild kittens or bottle-feeding an orphan calf? new subdivision...a bulldozer buriesthe last of the violets vanishing wilderness…beneath the pale moona snowy owl takes wing forgetting who…

The Last Fable

By Rebecca DrouilhetPicayune, MS, USA At midnight the little mouse lights a flickering candle and dips her heavy quill in ink. Outside her small hovel beneath a pallid moon the ocean is slowly dying. Even here, across a chasm too wide to cross, she can faintly hear the din of eight billion people roaring down ten-lane highways. But no one hears the mouse or heeds her warning. Words appear one by one, stark and black on the ivory parchment, only to fall like tears into an infinity where the ghosts of dead forests and dying shore birds flutter briefly and…

Renascence

By Jenny Ward AngyalGibsonville, North Carolina, USA No cougars are supposed to roam the Appalachian mountains.  They’re supposed to be extinct here, killed off or driven out by logging half a century ago.  And yet . . . here and there a single footprint lingers in damp earth, a wisp of hair clings to rusted wire, a blurred snapshot betrays the image of a ghost-cat slipping through shadows. And once, echoing down the mountainside where I stumbled mile after mile over rain-slicked rocks in gathering dusk—once, a long, unearthly scream to pierce the heart.  I utter a prayer into the darknessthat enfolds me—may…