HOMESICK: A PLEA TO SAVE OUR PLANET

In the 5th grade I won the science fair
with a project on climate change
That featured a paper mache ozone layer
with a giant hole, through which a paper mache sun
cancered the skin of a Barbie in a bikini
on a lawn chair, glaciers melting like ice cubes
in her lemonade.

It was 1987 in a town
that could have invented red hats
but the school principal gave me a gold ribbon
and not a single bit of attitude
about my radical political stance,

because neither he nor I knew it was a political stance.
Science had not been fully framed as leftist propaganda.
The president did not have a twitter feed
starving the world of facts.

I spent that summer as I had every summer
before, racing through the forest behind my house
down the path my father called the old logging road
to a meadow thick with raspberry bushes
whose thorns were my very first heroes
because they did nothing with their life but protect
what was sweet.

Sundays I went to church but struggled
to call it prayer if it didn’t leave grass stains
on my knees. Couldn’t call it truth if it didn't
come with a dare to crawl into the cave
by the creek and stay put until somebody counted
all the way to 100.

As a kid I thought 100 was the biggest number there was.
My mother absolutely blew my mind
the day she said, One hundred and one.

One hundred…AND WHAAAAAT!!!!????

Billionaires never grow out of doing that same math
with years. Can’t conceive of counting past their own lifespans.
Believe the world ends the day they do.
Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those
who have the longest commutes from their heads to their hearts?
Whose greed is the smog that keeps us from seeing
our own nature, and the sweetness we are here to protect?

Do you know sometimes when gathering nectar
bees fall asleep in flowers? Do you know fish
are so sensitive snowflakes sound like fireworks
when they land on the water? Do you know sea otters
hold hands when they sleep so they don’t drift apart?
Do you know whales will follow their injured friends
to shore, often taking their own lives
so to not let a loved one be alone when he dies?

None of this is poetry. It is just the earth
being who she is, in spite of us putting barcodes on the sea.
In spite of us acting like Edison invented daylight.

Dawn presses her blushing face to my window,
asks me if I know the records in my record collection
look like the insides of trees. Yes, I say,
there is nothing you have ever grown that isn’t music.
You were the bamboo in Coltrane’s saxophone reed.
The mulberries that fed the silkworms
that made the slippers for the ballet.
The pine that built the loom that wove the hemp
for Frida Khalo’s canvas. The roses that dyed her paint
hoping her brush could bleed for her body.

Who, more than the earth, has bled for us?
How do we not mold our hearts after the first spruce tree
who raised her hand and begged to be cut
into piano keys so the elephants can keep their tusks?

The earth is the right side of history.
Is the canyon my friend ran to
when no else he knew would echo
his chosen name back to him.
Is the wind that wailed through 1956 Alabama
until the poplar trees carved themselves into Dr King’s pulpit.
Is the volcano that poured the mercury
into the thermometers held under the tongue of Italy,
though she knew our fever was why her canals
were finally running clear. She took our temperature.
Told us we were too hot, even after
we’d spent decades claiming she was not.
Our hands held to her burning forehead,
we insisted she was fine while wildfires
turned redwoods to toothpicks,
readying the teeth of our apocalypse.

She sent a smoke signal all the way from California.
In New York City ash fell from the sky.
Do you know the mountains of California
used to look like they’d been set on fire
because they were so covered in monarch butterflies?
Do you know monarch butterflies migrate 3000 miles
using only the fuel they stored as caterpillars in the cocoon?

We need so much less than we take.
We owe so much more than we give.
Squirrels plant thousands of trees every year
just from forgetting where they left their acorns.

If we aimed to be just half as good
as one of the earth’s mistakes,
we could turn so much around.
Our living would be seed, the future would have roots.
We would cast nothing from the garden of itself.
and we would make the thorns proud.