Poems for Earth Day

Earth Day seems like a good day for thinking about gardens and all the ways that they teach us not only about ourselves, but also about past generations.  I wrote about that idea more extensively a few years ago in this post, which has a poem as well as a meditation on what gardening across generations teaches us.

It's also a good day to think more globally, as we continue to race towards a warmer future.  If you're in the mood for that kind of poem, I have one that I'll paste below.  It appears for the first time here:


The Citrus Trees Consider Climate Change




They contemplate concrete
as they smell the smoke at night,
their cousins felled in more fertile
fields, lands deemed ripe
for profitable plucking by developers.

The citrus trees consider climate
change as they produce their golden
globes of fruit. They know
that if the developers don’t chop
them down, global
warming will fell them fast.

The citrus trees, like other victims
of a century of suffering,
realize too late that they should have moved.
But we are all rooted
by a network of connections that keep
us trapped, planted in place.