earth

Fight for our lives

like wild animals, I am happy hiding
the artificial frightens my being —
but it is time to fight for the earth

Terri Guillemets

scrambled blackout poetry created from Rafe Martin, Birdwing, 2005

XXXI

My stiff-spread arms
Break into sudden gesture;
My feet seize upon the rhythm;
My hands drag it upwards:
Thus I create the dance.

I drink of the red bowl of the sunlight:
I swim through seas of rain:
I dig my toes into earth:
I taste the smack of the wind:
I am myself:
I live.

The temples of the gods are forgotten or in ruins:
Professors are still arguing about the past and the future:
I am sick of reading marginal notes on life,
I am weary of following false banners:
I desire nothing more intensely or completely than this present;
There is nothing about me you are more likely to notice than my being:
Let me therefore rejoice silently,
A golden butterfly glancing against an unflecked wall.

—John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950), “XXXI,” Irradiations, 1915

Out!

Come, abashed Self! admit one thing:
You have been indoors too much of late…
You should have been out wrestling with the sun,
Or running races with the rolling Earth…
Where’s the old smell of you, when, nostrils dilated,
You were drenched with sea-salt and soil-odor?
Where’s the lusty tang of your voice, cleansed by strong winds?
Your sun-burnt cheek?
And the animal magic of your eyes?
Out of the house with you…
Into the water! Into the sky!
Over the hills!

—James Oppenheim, “Out!,” War and Laughter, 1916

When you were a child

When you were a child, on a summer afternoon,
Did you lie in tall grass, listening to the crickets
Foreshadowing autumn, listening to the small
Infinite sounds of earth? Did you press your cheek
And your short brown body furiously down
Into the grass, so loving the narrow roots,
So loving the hard wild flanks of hills, and summer,
That when your slight strength broke at last, you cried…
Then rising in the slow wind, cried no more
But stood and gazed with grave young eyes upon
The brief, unburdened hours lived and gone,
Yourself, the child, abandoned in the grass,
Yourself, the man, earth’s lover, who would follow
The strong years deathward, aching and possessed?

—Frances Frost, “Year of Earth,” These Acres, 1932