Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Climate Change

“Habitat Degradation: Deforestation” 

Art and caption by Jill Pelto
(Used here with permission.)
"This painting uses data showing the decline in rain forest area from 1970 to 2010.These lush ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes, and with them, millions of beautiful species. For this series, I chose to separate the animals from their habitat, because that is ultimately what we are doing.
The tiger is trapped outside the forest, cornered. "
(Read the full article and view more paintings HERE.)
☼

“Action is the antidote to despair.” ~ Edward Abbey

“Climate change ignores borders, but so do friendship and solidarity. It is time for national interests to give way to the global good.” ~ Dr Saleemul Huq

☼

See  "Climate Change, The Musical" !

(Warning: Tough Love)

☼

Midweek Motif ~ Climate Change

So many global statements have been made about climate change ~ both learned and popular ~ that I implore myself and you to do something different in our poetry: Make it personal and specific.  Amplify an aspect of the world so that others can see it too.  Whatever your politics and moral positions are when it comes to climate change ~ let us see details, the evidence of your senses, your time and your spirit.  Make us hear, see, touch your world.  

This, then, is the challenge 
for your new poem. 

WILD GEESE by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

☼

Love Poems in the Time of Climate Change

By CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ
March 3, 2017

Sonnet XVII

I don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals, diamonds,
or reserves of crude oil that propagate war:
I love you as one loves most vulnerable things,
urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

I love you as the seed that doesn’t sprout but carries
the heritage of our roots, secured, within a vault,
and thanks to your love the organic taste that ripens
from the fruit lives sweetly on my tongue.

I love you without knowing how, or when, the world will end—
I love you naturally without pesticides or pills—
I love you like this because we won’t survive any other way,
except in this form in which humans and nature are kin,
so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,
so close that your sea rises with my heat.

☼

See more poetry at CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS.COM

 "Burning Worlds: The Best Poems 

About Climate Change" 
BY AMY BRADY ON AUGUST 30, 2017 

☼

Listen to

UN Climate Summit Poem "Dear Matafele Peinem" 

by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Marshall Islands)

☼

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 ~ Darkness is . . . )

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Climate

“Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.  
And that makes me quite nervous.” 
― Oscar Wilde

“Men argue. Nature acts.” ― Voltaire

“One of the biggest differences between humans and trees 

is simply that humans burn trees.” 
― M. Jackson, While Glaciers Slept: 

"Fortunately, the world’s governments are now fully convinced of the scientific evidence of climate change and the need to take urgent action. . . . "   (From WMO, where a number of countries have contributed videos of weather reports from the year 2050.)

***

“Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from plants that died long ago. We can give thanks to these ancestors of our present-pay foliage, but we can't give back to them. We can, however, give forward. . . . When tackling issues such as climate change, the stance of gratitude is a refreshing alternative to guilt or fear as a source of motivation.” 
― Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone

***

Midweek Motif ~ Climate

• World Meteorological Day is held annually on 23 March.
• The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is the UN system's authoritative voice on the state and behavior of the Earth's atmosphere, its interaction with the oceans, the climate it produces and the resulting distribution of water resources



Member states of the World Meteorological Organization.

• Technically, climate is a set of weather statistics gathered over many years, a summary of tendencies in a region condensed from many spheres: atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. 
• The science is too complex for me to understand.  It would take poets or novelists to explain it to me, just as they have been explaining the human and political climate to me for years―and the climate is changing.

Your challenge:  In a new poem, use climate or climate change as a thematic element.  As an added challenge―if you wish to accept it―use a specific situation to clarify a political or natural climate change in the past, present or future.

***

February

BY MARGARET ATWOOD

Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,   

a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries   

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.

If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am   

He’ll think of something. He settles

on my chest, breathing his breath

of burped-up meat and musty sofas,

purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,   

not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,   

declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,   

which are what will finish us off

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE at The Poetry Foundaton)
Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Source: Morning in the Burned House (1995)

Pura Vida

BY JOHN UPDIKE

(¡Pura vida! —Costa Rican phrase for "O.K." or "Great!")

Such heat! It brings the brain back to its basic blank.

Small, recurrent events become the daily news—

the white-nosed coati treading the cecropia's

bending thin branches like sidewalks in the sky,

the scarlet-rumped tanager flitting like a spark

in the tinder of dank green, the nodding palm leaves

perforated like Jacquard cards in a code of wormholes,

the black hawk skimming nothingness over and over.

What does the world's wide brimming mean, with hunger

the unstated secret, dying the proximate reality?

. . . . 

(Read the rest Here at The Poetry Foundation.)

UN Climate Summit Poem "Dear Matafele Peinem"

by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

***

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

                               (Next week Susan's Midweek will be ~ Ninety / The Nineties)