Part 2
Earth / Water / Air / Fire
“It’s our home, so let’s take care of it (it’s our home)”
Linda Russo
Data Suggest (Pilot Whales)/Warming Oceans
—for a. rawlings, after she reports on a pod of 53 pilot whales found stranded off the coast of Iceland, July 2019
Unceasing windblown
particles establish
a sky condition.
Forestfire smoke
yellows skies, grit-
dusted eyes.
Garbage days go by
and the complacence
between. Data
suggest decreasing
wilderness capacity.
Air unnaturally thick
with the vulnerable
farewells. Breaths
more vast than data
allow. Particulate matter
that’s why I am crying.
Data suggest strong
social bonds. A pod
of whales stranded
in an Icelandic fjord
is dead. Data suggest
more mackerel in the shallows
with the warming ocean
waters. Three years
in a row Pilot whales
have stranded. Data
suggest sands too
soft to bounce
a warning echo.
Their corpses
form a line: males
at either end, females
surrounding the birthing
mother in the center.
Data suggest matrilineal
kinship lines. Data suggest
a pod is led by one “pilot.”
Data suggest a variety
of behaviors that make
it difficult to discern.
Linda Russo, “Ritual for Citizen Science,” poetry video
dear dirtling (in ancient belonging)
I’m afraid of a world minus
each last one
the smallest, least empowered
unknowns
Eremocene (meaning,
the age of loneliness)
rage smothered
by reams of
legislation
I put my foot down
one and then the other
in ancient belonging
drawing in a slow breath, letting out
an entire breathing planet
an America patterned with enforced
migration off stolen land
collecting and cataloguing the data that results
is the sound of one hand making reparations
while another hand plants the seeds
that will shorten distances
between flowers
making kin they sing so loud
nectar’d singing deep into nests
sweet scent messaging
with reason that, to the Western mind
remains unknown
extravagantly
The Last Bird Poem
The wild is earth living its life to the full. The earth’s life is much larger than our own, but our own lives are part of it. If we take that life, we take our own.
—Robert Bringhurst & Jan Zwicky
It has birds in it!
—issued from the audience at a poetry reading
It has birds in it. It has rain in it, and then it has wet in it. It has all the time in the world in it.
It has voices in it. It has songs in it. It has feathers and shits in it. It has nests in it. It has looking for insects in it. It has earthworms in it.
It has grief in it. It has all the hues in it. It has simultaneity in it. It has reality in it. It has our grief in it.
It has prey in it. It has mice, voles, rabbits in it. It has a bird in it. It has more than our grief in it. It has other birds in it.
It has flaping in it. It has walking in it. It has swimming, diving, soaring in it. It had fledging in it. It has molting in it. It has leaping in it.
It has you in it. We are all in it. We are ‘we’ in it. It has nothing more than us in it. It only has room for some of us in it. It has dying in it.
It has birds in it. It has talking in it, communities in it. It has mating in it. It has thriving in it. It has profit in it. It has growth in it.
It has meaning in it. It has wonder in it. It has burning rainforests in it. It has cities in it. It has all the cities in it. It has the future beyond cities in it. It has smokey air in it. It has more heat, and it has more melting in it.
It has errors in it. It has idiots in it. It has arguments in it. It has disagreements in it. It has friends in it. It has friends eating friends in it. It has feasting on caracasses of friends in it. It has life in it.
It has cold desert nights in it. It has high desert noons in it. It has ruined bodies of water in it. It has dying, drying rivers in it. It has thirsty animals in it.
It has nature in it. It has no outside in it. It has the wrong questions in it. It has too much data in it. It has limits in it. It has possibilities in it. It has birds in it.
