(The image accompanying this piece of writing is of an oil painting, created by me, with the intent of abstractly representing my memories of the natural landscape in which I lived as a child.)

 

Self reflection holds weight in its ability to draw closer to truer matter

The warmth of the roots of our planet, moss-bed pillow of connection, moon-cradle of all birth

The intertwining of environmental roots, spread of seed and nurturing of soil, or destruction of it

Biomes adaptable in relationship between washing machine weather cycles 

Control setting malfunction, broken dirty water, defective because of our abuse

Once they head to sea, male leatherback sea turtles never return to land

Just as many of us have not returned from that chasm of material, a foreign world enemy to Earth

Why would they and their sandy hatchlings attempt to reach clean water when it has turned acidic?

Will we like our creation when it is before us, instead of prediction, graph for seconds 'melodramatic' news report?

All of this depends on us

 

In my small amount of time on Earth, and particularly in the past year alone, I have come to terms with the gravity our presence holds within the little realizations

We are no longer meager, shrunk number or size, neolithic, struggling to survive; the elements surrender to human foot

Large ash marks, on our neighbors, starving, choking as we move further into their greener yard

To fly through galaxies as machine, search for meaningful existence, extinguish it when found

With all our effort into exploration and the new measures taken to find power, we have preserved no sustainable practice forever

Natural parks have bombs underneath them set by development

How is it we cannot be in nature unless there is concrete to traverse it? We tread the ground to suffocate

War against survival of our species and the next

What an impact we've had!

 

In our impact, is there a wickedness? A greed for more despite the outcome,

Dead discoveries, burial of weak, survival industrial

Us versus them

"Them", nature, 

The meadow larks, live oak, does, milkweed-sated butterflies

Young sparrows call for food, woodpeckers, blue-jays

Dodo, passenger pigeon, 

Who deserves to live most?

 

I have lived in a city most of my life.

The maze of cars and lights at edge of thought, persistently,

and a realization that you have not seen all of the stars, bare, for years

In recalling my memories of childhood this year I've felt a deep longing

That distant home where we lived through deep undergrowth, no day without solace in sight of life

Me, hair down to feet again, tottering down hills barefoot with magnifying glass and butterfly net

Do you know anything about where you live, what is there waiting around you?

 

I recall the sea, and I feel our cabin and plot of land in fingertips lingering, the texture of wood plank and then bark, and I stand with nights when my grandmother sat on the roof with me to look at the stars, without choked crowding,  no smoke or automobile

I cannot remember the sought material of youth, though I hear the creeks babbling conversations in harsher places

I cannot remember my schoolmate's names or the color of new shoes, but I grasp the first bass fish, red eared slider and the buck five feet away, and the coyote and its children, playing rabbit kits in the field

I cannot remember my time in the tiny town down roads, but the day I saw that anonymous bird, immense and sleek, gaze at me, impossibly enthralled, take off before the descent of cruelty, animal, at dusk, I knew what angels must look like

And our family reunion with the road runners filled me with more joy than any new resort

We rely on bio-mass, consume it, reduce it, but fail to reduce our consumption of it 

Every power source flowing through the city, vegetation, meat taken from brink of extinction and then- 

what?

 

I miss that plot of land, that wood we owned and slept under, though I did not know the significance of it then. 

The blood, clear-cut from bodies, wad of money, crying grandmother

Dead wood, no growth, a wreckage of metal, habitat a 4 ft space squared off by empty nothing

The listening for grasshopper and whippoorwill and tree branch whistling,

Now silent

 

It was time to decide long before I was born, and it will be time to act still, long after I die

 

What is worth protecting?

Beautiful world

 

 

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