By Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left
— Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Inversnaid”
From Pangaea to the Tethys Sea our Mother Earth goes round, and round our central star appears, the Sun, traveling east to west, from Ethiopia to Hesperides, each day a blessing in this circle of life. Brought into this vital light with plants of every kind and fauna filling land and sea, fruitful, we were. And it was good.
We crept into caves to mark the walls with ochred images of creatures honored for their flesh, their spirit and being, different from our own, yet of the same.
The First Peoples made their homes, dressing their bodies, teaching their tongues, cherishing their kinship with the land.
We learned to turn the very Earth, the oldest of our gods, with plows, back and forth, year after year, reaping, sowing, wearing away the immortal, the seemingly inexhaustible land we would one day forget. And so, as our numbers rose and our cities grew and our knowledge fed our need for power, we tamed and conquered all. Or so we thought we would, quick, ready, resourceful humankind, now more human, less kind, kinship reduced to a great machine.
Our hearts cooled, the Earth warmed, we saw no end in sight. Round and round, each fight, another victory. And then we mastered space itself, we landed on the moon. What sight! The Earth in space – “a tiny, fragile ball of life, hanging in the void.” A blue dot where we are all one people, living in one world, together in our need to keep this improbable home home to all creation in all its diversity, its fragile beauty, our one and only home.
Let the earth last
And the forests stand a long time
— from a poem by the 15th century Aztec poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin
weather satellites
go round and round
empty promises
fracking
we learn new ways
not to change
an electric car
sighs to a stop
the last glacier groans
snowmelt
plum blossoms
on a polar bear
bird of paradise
a rainbow’s love song
in a chainsaw repertoire
strip mined
our purple mountain majesties
the emperor’s new clothes
old pond
spewing toxic waste
a frog croaks
the caboose
rattles past the setting sun
dust on stunted corn
washing up
on an island paradise
plastic plates
rising tide
she lifts her skirt
to wipe away a tear
a blue balloon
rising into a summer sky
the child waving goodbye
dry riverbed
the old bridge creaks
bone on bone
First published: Drifting Sands Haibun, Issue 15