The world is a delicate dervish.
It is an eyeball with an atmosphere
as thin as a sclera, and clear as one too.
Pretty pebble; the machinations of
the universe eventually set you here
four and a half billion years ago.
You happen to be our Only,
the place we return to,
cradling us in the face of all we do
to make you more hospitable.
We dig, we pave, we drill,
we hunt, we farm, desalinate
we raise our buildings up to heights
that stun
even ourselves.
You seem so vast, we disbelieve
that we could ever do anything to harm you.
But like the moment when a trickling tear
turns a parent into a human,
we see the acid reefs of your oceans,
sobs of wildfire, plaintive yellowing skies
as signs we are galloping away from you too hard,
wrenching you into something
we shouldn’t.
Earth, you are teaching us how to drive
and we just wrecked your car.
We need to stop and give thanks
that we are both still alive,
and learn how to slow and be more careful.
“It’s just what we do,” says a teenager.
“I used to do that, now I know better,” says an adult.
Harnessing the power of animal sacrifice
and hammering, plunging, outgassing, scraping,
is no longer necessary to survive.
We are beginning to know ourselves globally.
We are beginning to see – have seen –
the connections between what each of us does.
As if looking at a bacterium under a microscope
for the first time, we can see
how to help the situation.
Clarity, granularity, we are getting
closer and closer.
Like the eyeball that the earth itself is,
we are becoming an eye, too —
an I, too — an I that can rise
above its former situation.
Rather than sickness,
we can choose health,
rather than poverty or wealth — wisdom,
there’s actually something we can do
to help our dear old Earth out,
to be like birds and use the power of the winds,
to be like lizards and harness the sun,
to be like fish and harness water.
It has left us these clues in the species
that have roamed and waved around it for so long.
Earth is showing us, with its remaining splendor
how to take the next step.
If we dare to become the species
that finally knew itself,
That finally mastered stewardship, not just Earth.
—
L. J. Atkinson is a poet living in California. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from San Francisco State University, where she has also taught. Her work can be found in Literary Veganism, After the Pause, Plainsongs, Transfer, Birdland Journal, and others.
