
‘I think as an ecologist. But I feel as a member of a great family – one that includes the elephant and the wheat stalk as well as the schoolteacher and the industrialist. This is not a mental condition, but a spiritual condition. Poetry is a product of our history, and our history is inseparable from the natural world. Now, of course, in the hives and dungeons of the cities, poetry cannot console, it carries no weight, for the pact between the natural world and the individual has been broken. There is no more working for harvest – only hunting, for profit. Lives are no longer exercises in pleasure and valor, but only the means to the amassment of worldly goods. If poetry is ever to become meaningful to such persons, they must take the first step – away from their materially bound and self-interested lives, toward the trees, and the waterfall. It is not poetry’s fault that it has so small an audience, so little effect upon the frightened, money-loving world. Poetry, after all, is not a miracle. It is an effort to formalize (ritualize) individual moments and the transcending effects of these moments into a music that all can use. It is the song of our species.’
Mary Oliver
A few wintry verses from this past year’s renga
*
Gwen carries her own placard
I don’t want to live
on a spaceship
what you give the forest
the forest gives you back
I plant eight buddleia
hoping for a summer
astonished by butterflies
defrosting the freezer
is today’s weather
all the little suns
on my glasses
are rain
more a question
of when not if
our culture
written in snow
and the planet’s on fire
everything racing
wily coyote legs
a raw stillness
in the house
Arwen’s blessing
on the short day’s back
the long night
trailer load of logs –
alder, Matt says,
burns hot
this will end
this will carry on
[Quotations from Eugenio Montale, Laurie Anderson, Moshe Feldenkrais, Octavia Butler, Henrik Blind.]
