Rajani has been kind enough to include some of my poems in her latest chapbook “A is for Anthropocene”. I wish her every success with the publication.
Earth day haibun
Post-pandemic, life on the peninsula has changed. The seaside towns know no off season now. Ever expanding housing estates sprawl out across farmland. Narrow country roads are clogged with SUVs. The solitary tracks I used to walk have become bustling thoroughfares.
I’m past solastalgia* now but I don’t think they’ve coined a word for what I feel these days. This numbness. This sense of unreality and disbelief. Don’t people realise we’re killing the planet?
Driving at sunset yesterday an autumn mist hung in the air. Hazy lines of it streaked across the rising moon. The seas of tranquility were obscured. Despite the hour and the need to get home I pulled over by the old jetty for a moment. Seagulls wheeled overhead as I left my car. Out on the water recreational fishermen turned their boats back towards the harbour while all around me walkers, cyclists and joggers pursued fitness with vengeance. As I lifted my phone to take to a snapshot, I saw a professional photographer unpacking his gear. Suddenly I became aware of myself as the observer observing the observer.
Stepping back further,
retreating into silence
I pray for the Earth.
*Solastalgia is a neologism that describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. It is a combination of the Latin word “sōlācium” (comfort) and the Greek root “-algia” (pain, suffering, grief)1. The term was coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003. Solastalgia is an emerging form of depression or distress caused by environmental change – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solastalgia
prompt: https://dversepoets.com/2024/04/22/haibun-monday-4-22-24-earth-day/
The light these days
The autumn light in town is hard,
Like hammered steel it glints
splintering into laser beams off cars,
highlighting the flatness of life
these days,
these Anthropocene days.
For reasons too numerous to mention
I drive most days now
guzzling gas, adding to the pollution.
Pumping carbon into the atmosphere
my life becomes a farce of itself.
My conscience twists and turns
unable to justify my own actions
but caught,
oh so caught
these days,
these Anthropocene days.
Out of town on country roads
the light glimmers, stretches,
an autumn haze blurs distances
and I long to be free to drive,
somewhere, anywhere away from
these days,
these Anthropocene days.
Most days when I’m driving,
thinking these thoughts,
feeling this ecological grief,
I see eagles
wheeling high above the sun bleached land,
and the roads that just go on and on
but never arrive anywhere I want to be
these days,
these Anthropocene days.
Certainties dismantling
all we once held as true unravelling
these days
these Anthropocene days
yet still the eagle soars.
I hear its message on the wind.
See the big picture.
there’s always somewhere new to go,
somewhere higher,
somewhere lighter.
prompt: https://newwhatsgoingon.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-coming-of-light.html
D is for Decentering
Poems for Week 4 of Rajani’s Anthropocene Challenge – https://thotpurge.wordpress.com/2023/10/17/distress/
After my deep dive in the Anthropocene over the past few weeks I am now exploring ways to live with integrity during these times where so many crises threaten our old way of life. The way I see, it’s time to explore different ways of being human.
Does the Earth hear me,
see me,
feel me,
when I tend the garden,
whisper thank you to the flowers,
lean my back against a tree?
Some say the way forward now lies
in reconnecting with ancient ways of being,
in decentering the human
in deconstructing egoic separation,
in walking on the living Earth a part of all that is.
B is for Beauty
Seagrass fringe the blue bay,
golden filaments wave with the tide.
Further out, dolphins leap.
The waters shimmer in their wake.
On the farther shore blue hills dream.
The beauty, the calm
so desperate now –
the balance of life disturbed,
the sacred harmony ruptured.
A boy and a grandmother wander.
Beachcombing they find treasure
– a fragment of sea washed glass,
a spiral patterned shell.
The sun sets.
The boy dances, silhouetted by the light.
The grandmother whispers a prayer.
Let beauty open hearts,
let us find ways to heal ourselves,
each other,
all life on Earth.
May all beings dance as one.
Prompts:
https://desperatepoets.com/2023/10/02/desperate-beauty/
and
Rajani’s Anthropocene Alphabet – https://thotpurge.wordpress.com/2023/10/03/bramble-cay-melomys/
This poem also brings my series about the Anthropocene for a close for now. You can read the thoughts that led to the poem here – https://wayfaring9.wordpress.com/2023/10/04/dwelling-in-the-anthropocene/
Wayfaring in the anthropocene
We learn to think along straight lines,
interlocking grids,
mind mazes of conformity,
conceptual prisons of normality
where destinations are pre-determined,
curtailed and controlled.
I’d like to be like Basho
taking to the narrow roads in spring.
Held back, hemmed in by convention,
I stop before I begin.
Is it that my wayfaring now
is to be the metaphoric kind?
Like Emily Dickinson
am I to be a traveler in residence,
staying put in this grey place,
this purgatory of repetition.
Wayfaring in the anthropocene
despair obscures the path
yet, whispering in dreams,
the symbiocene.
An opening beckons.
Before embarking on this journey along ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ the Japanese haiku poet, Matsuo Basho wrote:-
“How long ago, I wonder, did I see a drift of cloud borne away upon the wind, and ceaseless dreams of wandering become aroused? Only last year, I had been wandering along the coasts and bays; and in the autumn, I swept away the cobwebs from my tumbledown hut on the banks of the Sumida and soon afterwards saw the old year out. But when the spring mists rose up into the sky, the gods of desire possessed me, and burned my mind with the longing to go beyond the barrier at Shirakawa. The spirits of the road beckoned me, and I could not concentrate on anything.” https://minookatap.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/the-narrow-road-to-the-deep-north.pdf
linked to – https://desperatepoets.com/2023/09/01/desperate-poets-open-link-weekend-19/
Wayfaring 