Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Biodiversity

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."

--Eden Phillpotts

“Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty.”
  ― Albert Einstein 

source

 Definition From Wikipedia: "Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life. This can refer to genetic variation, species variation, or ecosystem variation within an area, biome, or planet."

General meaning of biodiversity

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Midweek Motif ~ Biodiversity

Today I am trying to wrap my mind around the diversity of life.  How do we fit into the family of life on our home planet?  

Here's one viewpoint: 

 “The extraordinary thing we now know, thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life, everything, all the three million species of life and plant life—all have the same source. We all come from a single source."

―Jonathan Sacks in Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise

Your Challenge:  In a new poem bring us a little way into one aspect of biodiversity, helping to make visible our part in the whole.

How farmers produce biodiversity.

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry
 

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd

By Walt Whitman

 

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,

Whispering, I love you, before long I die,

I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,

For I could not die till I once look’d on you,

For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.

Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe,

Return in peace to the ocean my love,

I too am part of that ocean, my love, we are not so much separated,

Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!

But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,

As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;

Be not impatient – a little space – know you I salute the air, the ocean and the land,

Every day at sundown for your dear sake, my love.

 Book of Hours II, 16 

By Rainer Maria Rilke

How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing –
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly. 

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Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

              (Next week Sumana’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Gift.)