“Hiking and camping and gardening have given me a deep connection with the natural world — and being a gardener has made me keenly aware of climate warming.”
“Hiking and camping and gardening have given me a deep connection with the natural world — and being a gardener has made me keenly aware of climate warming. I am also a writer, and a couple of my recent poems suggest my personal response to the changes I’ve experienced:
1. Waiting for Snow
After the winter solstice, it should snow.
The grayish grass and mess of faded leaves
should be transformed to white lacework on trees,
to mounds and sheets of white that hide the ground.
When January’s stuck in duns and browns,
and gray-black branches are the only view
my window offers, and moisture from the sky
plunks down as rain, I worry. The weather’s awry.
Yet even now, each morning dawn’s new light
comes earlier, and nightfall later comes;
the sunrise spot creeps eastward out of the south
just as it ought, nor does the moon succumb
to any sublunary shiftings of weather and clime,
but moves through its phases reliably as time
can be counted on to pass.
And now at last
a little snow comes sparkling past the streetlight.
Soon a full moon will shine down, white on white.
And if all isn”t well, it’s still partly right.
This two or four inches of snow will blanket well
the garlic and daffodil shoots that were starting to poke
untimely from unfrozen earth. These shoots are tough.
They’ll live, and when the Spring returns at last
grass will be green, and flowers’ miraculous bloom
will ease our hearts again, almost like the past.
2. In the Pleasant Darkness
In late Summer night times,
with ceiling fan whirring
and windows wide open
to scents of warm earth
perfuming the bedroom,
I sleep to the sound of innumerable crickets
all fiddling and chirping.
They’ll go til frost stops them
and come back next summer.
They hardly sound lonely
so am I the only one
missing the fireflies
that once starred the nights?”