Tag Archives: Ecology

Gradual Justice

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Gradual Justice

Life metes out a gradual justice that we may not  see.
Not choreographed for one lifetime, not designed for you or me,
but rather, for the planet or the universe.
There’s no way to avoid it, circumvent it or rehearse.
We’re a part of something larger even as we make mistakes
as nature covers over the snafus mankind makes.
Great men may be jaunty, swelled up with their great plan,
but nature has more problems than looking after man.
She has the heart of all within, seeing a scope broader
than the needs of man or any other great marauder.
There is just so much for any of us. When we grab for more,
we can be pretty sure we may be headed out the door.
What species will replace us, or how will we evolve
if we don’t act quickly our problems to resolve?
Even all technology is part of nature’s plan.
Perhaps it’s written that robots will take the place of man.
Micro chips for healing and mechanical hearts
are only the beginning. They are only the starts.
Species that overgraze domains bring about their endings.
So it may be with us with all our diggings and our vendings.
Machines poisoning our air and putting poisons on our shelves
May only be the means of making more room for themselves! 

 

The prompts today are justice, heart, jaunty and gradual. Here are the links:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/28/friday-rdp-justice/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/28/fowc-with-fandango-heart/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/28/jaunty/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/23/daily-addictions-2018-week-38/gradual

A New World’s Morning

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Click on any photo to enlarge all and view as slide series.

 

Ubiquitous networks of  highways crisscross the face of Mother Earth–lines that age her fresh face. Pockmarks of potholes question their durability, whereas Earth lives on, in one form or another.

Dams crack and spill their water freshly across lake beds parched for centuries.
Bones of dinosaurs peek out from eroded banks of clay. Plants spread from potholes in gouged pavement. Somewhere in the arctic ice, the past lies thawing, ready to be reborn.

Who knows but that the
nightfall of mankind may be
a new world’s morning?

 

I don’t know what I did this week.  I seem to have collected prompts from a different week for each prompt site.  Perhaps I’ve been at it too long and should retire. The prompt words  I somehow collected were highway, durable, ubiquitous and morning. The form is for dVerse Poets haibun challenge.

Darn! I now find even the comments and Mr. Linky for dVerse are closed, even though they say they are open all week.  I guess this just isn’t my day, or I am as cracked as the pavement above…..Here are the “wrong” links I used:

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/01/fowc-with-fandango-highway/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/daily-addictions-2018-week-34/durable
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/ubiquitous/
https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/03/haibun-monday-good-morning/

 

If We Listened to the Birds

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On the dive,

Click on any photo to enlarge all.

If We Listened to the Birds

If I were a mighty bird,
fluent in both voice and word,
when the weather shifted colder,
I’d wing myself to royal shoulder,
have a perch and, I confess,
use all the powers I possess
to loosen up and leave my mark
on that stodgy matriarch,
to feel my presence and touch of wings
and know what necessary things
each creature in nature brings with it.
How each thing comes together to fit.

This I would find exhilarating.
By my presence, educating
the powers-that-be to think of nature
as more than just a nomenclature.
Perhaps I’d tell the president
that I have been heaven sent
to tell the powers that abide
that God’s not really on their side.
God would have us guard our earth
There’s more than money that marks its worth.
All of nature, without a doubt,
makes the world of man work out.

If those large personalities
who run our world would only, please,
take heed of what I have to say,
we’d survive to live another day,
another year, another eon.
We’d have a peaceful planet to be on.
The brother eagle that guides their flight
knows too well extinction’s plight.
The symbol there that marks their seal
is anguished over the ordeal
that fellow creatures of nature face
because of loss of living space.

Our national parks sold off for oil,
waters from which fish recoil,
oceans plugged with plastic waste
we idly cast off in our haste.
While politicians rail and bicker,
our society grows sicker.
Hospitals far out of reach,
schools encouraged not to teach
science, but religious fable
that makes the politicians able
to pull the wool over the eyes
of those who believe their disguise.

It’s true that often what we get
is exactly opposite
of what they promise, their rhetoric
stirring us to moods euphoric
when in fact they’re empty words
meant to bilk admiring herds.
Look deeper at what they profess.
They promise more, but give us less.

The prompts for today are bird, royal, exhilarating, possess. Here are the links, in case you want to play along:

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/08/rdp-saturday-bird/

https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/08/fowc-with-fandango-royal/

https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/08/exhilarating/

https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/daily-addictions-2018-week-35/possess

Earthlings

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Earthlings

Children love to play in it,
while miners spend their day in it.
We grow our food and build each home
in our planet’s dark rich loam. 
If we are wise, we choose to mentor it,
lest too soon we’re called to enter it.

The prompt word for the dVerse Poets Quadrille challenge was “earth.” The only rule for a quadrille is that it must be exactly 44 words long, not counting the title.

Petrified “Would”

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Please enlarge and examine this photo carefully, lest you miss the point of it.

Petrified “Would”

Wood, it seems, in days gone by
stood long enough to petrify,
but once mankind required attire,
and therefore was in need of fire,
he found meat tasted better fried,
and since, no wood has petrified.
Each tree that grows is quickly used.
Our rainforests have been abused
to grow more cattle and more crops.
Our war on forests never stops.
Erosion creases soil in gullies.
Each pipeline scars, each factory sullies.
I fear it won’t be rectified
‘til man himself is petrified!
If only all the big guys would
heed the solution while they could!

The prompt at Daily Addictions was petrify.

Dim Prospects

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Dim Prospects
(A Hyperbolic Modest Proposal)

We’re blotting the sun out and dimming the stars
with furnaces, factories, wildfires, cars.
With overproduction causing glut after glut,
it seems our improvements are anything but.
Man’s once-shiny future is now looking dim,
and he’s pulling the whole planet under with him.
Fires and hurricanes, tsunamis and quakes,
rampaging hillsides and drying-up lakes
are messages sent that the earth’s fighting back—
giving us warnings of things out of whack.

When fat cats in limos and thousand buck suits
have usurped all the seeds and kept all the fruits,
and all of their products are made by machines,
three dimensional copiers making our jeans,
our autos, appliances, organs and cars,
our TVs and glasses, our bikes and guitars,
we’ll all need welfare—mere motionless blobs
once they have “teched” away all of our jobs.
And since welfare is something that they’ve soundly booed,
what will the masses do for their food?

Where will we sleep once all of the money
all of the milk and all of the honey
is in the pockets of those gazillionaires
cushioned away in their billion-buck lairs?
Keeping a few of us here on the scene
to garden and cook for them, to serve and clean,
they’ll let unwashed masses starve in their cots
and buy from each other their trillion dollar yachts
And perhaps they’ll be happy with what they’ve created:
machines making products ’til their needs are sated.

Now that they’ve purchased our ship of state
and made it their own, it seems that the fate
of unlucky millions who’ve gone overboard
for lack of the medicine they can’t afford
is nothing to them, for not one of them cares
how any common citizen  fares.
Lest we riot against them out of our need
for money for food they’ve usurped in their greed,
issue guns to the populace. Let us dispense
of  these unneeded masses. To them, it makes sense!

The prompt word today is dim.

Ocean Koan II

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Ocean Koan

The dolphins ride in on the music,
but why did they come here?
Did they seek to lend their harmonies
to a music new and queer?
Did they soar in on its melody,
come  in on a riff,
drawn by its dissonant whistle—
a mere beckoning whiff?

Whatever the dolphins are hearing,
whatever they’re trying to reach,
we don’t understand their language
as they lie stranded on our beach.
Perhaps we divert them with towers
that speak in a tongue their own,
and though it’s not our intention,
our messages form a koan

that they are driven to answer
as we’re drawn to outer space,
pulled to find our others
in an alien clime and place.
We believe we are harmless and loving,
at peace with their watered dreams;
when in truth we are drying their world up—
ripping it at the seams.

We send out the signals to pull them
to where they should not be,
like fairytales told to children
that draw them to our knee—
We turn our backs to the seaward window,
seal our ears to their keening tones
as the dolphins swimming landward
pave our beaches with their bones.

The prompt today was believe. As I am trying to get a book together, I’ve found an excellent way to meld these efforts with my blog.  As the prompts come in, I look for an older poem written to the same prompt and spend the time editing it rather than writing a new poem. This one has changed a good deal.  If you want to see the original, go here. Let me know if you like the original better.

Villains of the Universe

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jdbphoto

Villains of the Universe

Before it had been pillaged–scraped and torn and rent,
nature had a dignity everywhere you went.
A hill remained a hillside and a stream remained a stream.
This was before the elements began their silent scream—
long before the advent of smog and acid rain—
before our exploitation of the earth became inane
with our damming and our digging, our culling and our raping—
before we had created a world that needs escaping.

Now we thrust out into space to find another place to plunder
to repeat inane histories. To ruin and tear asunder.
Any new place that we find, thinking it a haven,
will soon be altered as before with acts as crudely craven.
We do not learn our lessons. We never quite atone
for messing into matters we should have left alone.
Like children picking at a scab, then worrying the sore,
we’ll frack the universe apart and crack it at its core.

 

jdbphoto

R.I.P. Mother Earth

 

 

The prompt word today was dignify.

What Can We Do to Improve our Town?

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This is what the kids at Campamento Estrella (Camp Star) in San Juan Cosala, Mexico had to say today about saving their world:

(Please click on first photo to enlarge all.)

 

Centering

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Centering

Many folks are fearing the center will not hold.
Our unity is broken, our future has been sold.
But the ways of nature are complex and manifold.
And when the final stories of mankind have been told,
of how we “bested nature” by trying to break its mold,
when all our quests have ended, both for glory and for gold;
 we won’t be its ending, but just another fold
whose exploits lay beneath the earth, written in the mold—
of how we “tamed” an environment that was too brash and bold,
wrapping it in hydrocarbons, conquering the cold.

The prompt word today was “center.”