Category: So Little Time

Something There is That Doesn’t Love a Tree

by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, poetry, So Little Time

I stopped once to hear a sitar
played in a leafy shade.
A carpet had been laid to soften
spreading roots, and when the musician
paused, he rested his instrument
against a sturdy trunk.

Felled for a utility pole, says the young gardener
with outraged face. Couldn’t they
have found another place?

Now, where just a week before
we gathered in uncommon grace,
a stump and side-lying trunk.
Growth rings slowly weep sap.
Severed branches collect in a heap.

Something there is that doesn’t love a tree,
that sees only expendability; sees logs,
split and stacked for firewood;
sees timber, 2 X 4’s, cash.

That looks at shade and wants full sun;
that wants to make way for a lawn,
a fairway, a putting green.

©July 29, 2020
#68 of my 100 Poem Pandemic Challenge

Revised 1/12/21 with Susanna Rich

It’s Too Late, Baby

by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, So Little Time

Carole King’s Tapestry, the concert based on her album and performed last year in Hyde Park, London, has been turned into a film and opened in theaters across the U.S. yesterday for a one night stand. We bought our tickets in advance online, imagining the show would sell out. It didn’t. In fact, attendance at the Providence Mall Cinema was sparse. As her fans know, King’s album transformed her overnight from a songwriter best known for writing hits for others to a star in her own right. If you missed the show last night, keep your eyes open.

As she launched into her opening number, I Feel the Earth Move, well, I did. Feel the move, that is. It has been that kind of week — New York Magazine’s The Uninhabitable Earth, the Guardian coverage of the sixth extinction, and then this morning, the news of the collapse of the Larsen C shelf, an ‘iceberg the size of Delaware,’ forming a new island. A small piece of the earth. Moving, we don’t know where or what else could change as a result.

For me, these events tend to crowd out the news about the G20 meeting, mounting cries of Impeach!, and anxiety over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions given the current state of our own governance. I know my own diplomat father who spent several months a year as a delegate to the Geneva disarmament talks in the late 50’s, would be turning over in his grave, if he had one. I put my trust in the quiet, behind the scenes, work of special counsel, Robert Mueller, to help bring a shameful chapter of our history to a conclusion.

That said, I found myself weeping when Carole King launched into It’s Too Late and the cameras panned over the faces of the immense crowd (estimated 65,000) of Londoners, many of them young, many of them singing along.  For the same reason, I feel rocked by the sounds of little children in the playground right next to the AirBnB where I am currently living, and when I think about our teenage grandchildren — all children — whose lifespan may expose them to decades of life-threatening hypothermia, water and food insecurity, disease we had thought vanquished, and the breakdown of civil life.  Maybe, as my friend (father, poet and blogger, The Green Skeptic), Scott Edward Anderson says (and not for the first time), “We’re toast!”

I was in the process of pounding out a post more in keeping with Transition Tales (Tip, Tools and Ideas for a More Resilient Future), about how decentralized solar power is bring electricity and positive change to parts of Africa, when Scott’s social media comment attached to the said link popped into the screen.  Usually I ignore these, but I stopped writing and read the New York Magazine piece — “too scary,” “climate disaster porn, ” could spur cities into action or make people feel hopeless” — and that was that for the upbeat post I was working on. Even before the Guardian’s piece or today’s news from Antartica.

So, I put it to you readers: Do you agree it’s game over?  Are we toast?  Is it too late, baby? And if so (given that climate crisis denial is not an option here), what are you doing to keep your spirits up, to press on with your climate and political activism, to keep on keeping on. Seriously, I want to know because it has been that kind of week.  Whatever you care to share, my comment section awaits. I’ll be there, yes, I will.

Now Hear This

by Marika Stone, posted in activism, arts activism, environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement, So Little Time

Last Friday evening, I was in good company and I don’t just mean the company of other artists at The Box Gallery’s The New American Patriot: Climate Art in the Public Interest, though the work — mostly visual — was often powerful, and my contribution in keeping with the theme.

FreeVector-23So Little Time: A Spoken Word Performance on Climate Crisis in Four Parts is a 15-minute compilation of poetry and prose drawn from several sources and includes one original work.
I had been thinking about doing such a piece for over a year, as my passion for climate and women’s issues began to overlap. Putting the show together was fulfilling in itself in that I drank deeply from a very large spring. I am grateful to the curators for accepting my proposal and to the friends who showed up to hear my performance, and hung in there despite significant acoustic challenges.

As I need hearing aids myself, I know intimately how frustrating it can be to miss what is being said. But those who struggled to hear me are only part of the good company in which I found myself during the performance. It later dawned on me that my voice – and I don’t mean to overstate this relatively minor event given the scale of the issue – was just one more that isn’t being heard because 1. There is too much other noise, 2. Listening well is an endangered skill, and 3. We have trained ourselves to turn a deaf ear to whatever messes with our worldview. And that is a huge part of the problem for which there is no other solution but to do what climate scientists, activists, shamans, actors, writers and poets have been doing: keep telling the inconvenient truth, in as many places as possible, in as many ways as possible with the intention that words will become deeds. Just keep on keeping on. And I plan to.  If my readers have thoughts about venues and/or other outlets, including social media, I’m all ears!

I am immensely grateful to Green Writers Press for permission to use work from So Little Time: Words and Images for a World in Climate Crisis, compiled largely by poet/climate activist, Greg Delanty. I also chose, and was granted permission to use, a poem by Rachel Lewis, a 2014 winner of the Cape Farewell/ Young Poets Network Competition for poems exploring climate change. And I drew from The Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground collection, under fair use permission. My friend, Jean Cavanaugh, allowed me to quote from an uplifting Facebook post entitled Scarcity is a Myth. We all deserve a hearing.

I end for now with a poem from So Little Time.

Global Warming ~ Jane Hirshfield

When his ship first came to Australia,
Cook wrote, the natives
Continued fishing, without looking up.
Unable, it seems, to fear what was too large to be comprehended.

More:

See internal links for my sources, including the excellent volume, So Little Time (available from http://greenwriterspress.com/books/our-first-books/so-little-time/, Amazon and other book outlets). The Guardian’s collection, curated by UK poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, is read by actors, James Franco and Jeremy Irons, among others.

Marshallese poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner speaking at the UN Climate Leaders Summit in 2014

Almost anything by Wendell Berry