Into the Wild BlueAfrica

Science Fair

You cannot say the names of colors
if they are printed in the ink
of other colors.

Not quickly and correctly.

Green algae explodes with growth
when phosphorous is added,
such growth that it chokes out other life

and then dies itself.

The seeds of radish and lettuce planted together
in a petri dish will vie for space
but ultimately live--

until the cat jumps up to eat them.

You can make a volcano out of paper maché,
but it will either fizzle out like a runny nose
or erupt explosively.

Then you must scrub the kitchen walls.

When the three-paneled board is covered
in your findings and charts and photographs,
you get a participation ribbon and an A.

Have you learned anything?

Yes:
when thrown on a bonfire,
three-paneled boards go up fast.

Evolution [Tree Hugger]

That willow is my cousin.

No, I am not crazy,
nor have I watched Pocahontas
one too many times.

That willow is your cousin, too.

As am I,
or I might as well be:
I am as close to you as your second cousin,
our sameness bound in base pairs,
a twisting ladder, collapsible,
folded into every cell.

That algae is also our cousin,
though to the willow more of a grandfather.

Green algae chewing on sunlight
for sugar,
exhaling oxygen so we all might live.

He gave rise
to moss to ferns to conifers to flowers
to the willow trailing long branches,
her yellow leaves fluttering in the
half-light of dawn.

And further back still,
some prokaryotic bacterium like the ones
you drown in hand-sanitizer
and antibiotics
gave rise to the algae and our
oldest animal selves.

All the world a tangled web
a family tree a family willow
with branches trailing where one has died out,
fluttering leaves where others live.
The roots supporting the limbs and
the limbs supporting the roots.

Beautiful and terrible:
vegans are no more blameless than those
who dream of bacon while the pig still squeals.

We have to eat something, after all,

thought it seems we could do without
killing ourselves.

The bacterium, the algae, the willow
are our cousins, and we are cousins,
you and I.

Let us embrace.

Seedlings nodding their
budding heads in the gray rain
falling gently on

green fields resplendent
with brightly-colored birds and
pale delicate leaves,

sleeping sleeping but
waking now for summertime
to grow and to live.

Sometimes when I am trapped inside
the city streets
the wild green of a courtyard
invites me in
invites me out
and all I need is to lie on my back
in the springtime sun
belly-up like a spaniel
rolling back and forth to break
the musk green scent of grass and
let it wash all over me
so that when I return to
the concrete and asphalt that
do not break beneath my feet except
to ruble
I will still smell like
the wild green country.

The ocean creeps in with whispers and murmurs
I owned you once and I
can take you back
washes up the shore to the mountains and then
back again by morning
out in the distance, blue and wide,
still murmuring
I owned you once and I
can take you back
taken back to sleep
deep
deep in the sea

Plunge my hands into
the grass to ask forgiveness
for being human.

Wrap me in your warmth
your softness, the dark green of
your scent, your sharpness

and absolve me.

This is not a poem.

No, really. It's not.

Okay, now that I've established the nonpoetriness of this post:

I'm behind. I know I'm behind. I'm quite far behind (say, almost half a month). But you know what? That's okay. This is more poetry than I've written in two years--more poetry than I've written in the entire past two years combined--and some of it's actually halfway decent, or at least based off decent ideas. So even if I don't write any more poetry this month (which seems likely, given that I have three papers to write and an exam to study for), I feel like I've won.

You know, in a metaphorical sense.

Because at least when May comes and school is over, I can go through and revise some of this and end up with six or eight good poems to add to my collection. So I'm feeling pretty awesome about the whole thing, and I'm really glad I decided to participate, even though I'm behind.

Kratts' Kreatures

I still believe
in the tail-end of the
Tasmanian tiger
that went whipping around
a corner
and vanished from sight
the way a child believes
in Santa Clause.
My hope for the world.

I am not brave enough to be
a scientist.

To know the world is
hurtling to disaster,
howling the whole way.

To hear the screams of a thousand
extinct birds and beasts,
the dying gasps of over-hunted fish
and chemical-killed plants,
to see in the golden eyes of the
Honshu wolf:
You killed us.
You killed us.
You killed us.

I know the crimes of my kind.
They are as numerous as
the stars.

Once you have heard what
I hear and
seen what I see,
you cannot unknow it.

You cannot feign ignorance,

cannot refuse to change
your ways but
fluorescent lights and
energy-saving dishwashers will not
save the world.

Not when seven billion people
crowd onto a planet built for
three.

Not in the face of BP's oil spills,
the propaganda of the
Koch brothers,
deer that destroy the forest
when the wolves die off.

Mankind has always had a
problem with predators.

Could try to save the world, but I
would like nothing better than to
crawl into a cave
and sleep until it is over.

Not an option.
Hospitable caves in the world are
far too few,
financial obligations far too many.

So instead of a scientist
I become a teacher:

Educating the masses and
passing off my problems
to the next generation, just like
all the generations before.

You drove away our Brothers
and killed the Buffalo for sport
(what kind of Hunter is he
who leaves his kill to rot on the plains?)

You taught our Men to sport as well,
sixteen Buffalo with seventeen arrows
(and they left their prize for the Wolves,
stink rising from the hides in the glare).

You raped our Women
and took our Children to your Christian schools
(but what was wrong with our stories,
the Sky Father and the Great Turtle?)

And then you walked us down
a dusty westward path.
(You did not walk, no, but rode horses
while our elders wore their feet away.)

Eight hundred miles.
Four thousand dead.
(The ghosts cry out:
And all we earned was a place in your textbooks.)

You ripped the forests from their roots
and paved over plains
(how can you live
in a land so barren?)

And now you scoff at your poor and hungry
(they should work for their bread)
and anger at the threat of strangers in your land
(they steal your jobs and spend your taxes).

You do not know.
You have never known.

(What kind of Man is he
who leaves his Brothers to wither away?)

Clearly I've been feeling a lot of white human/white American guilt this month, but here's a poem that's *slightly* different, at least:

Talk of censorship upsets my books.
The pages rustle at the very idea of
public bonfires in the square.
So I scoop them up and hug them,
whisper that I would snatch them from
their fiery death
and hide them in my attic,
reading them by flashlight long past
my bedtime.
And later, I tell them, I would read them
to my children,
who will know no censors.

Tiny Gavin, still too young
to realize that fairies are just for girls,
sidles up to me as he waits
to pick out lamb's ear for his garden
and whispers,
I can't believe we found
real fairy dust!
and I congratulate myself:
a small reward for going out an hour early
to sprinkle glitter on the garden paths.

I sit upon the hill and think
of things that I have seen:
mountains tall and leaves in fall,
the trees and hillsides green.
And as I think I start to see
that all such things have gone;
it is now hard to see the birds
and harder still to hear their song.

I sit beside the brook and think
of things that I have known:
a warming hearth beneath the dark,
the seeds of flowers sown.
And as I think I start to see
that all such things are late;
though love would give us better yield,
our fields are sown with hate.

Spring Series 1

The yellow warblers
return at last, mate and nest
in the greenery.

Spring Series 2

They say that yellow
butterflies are the spirits
of our departed,

letting us know they
are at last at peace, at rest:
Today, I saw two.