Emily Skaja, from "Brute Strength", Brute
June Gehringer, “EARTH IS AN ANAGRAM FOR HEART, U FUCKING IDIOTS”
[Text ID: “I don’t want to talk about it. / I want to lie in what little grass remains / and try to fit your heart inside of mine.”]
Ruth Stone, Green Apples
It’s solar and wind and tidal and geothermal and hydropower.
It’s plant-based diets and regenerative livestock farming and insect protein and lab-grown meat.
It’s electric cars and reliable public transit and decreasing how far and how often we travel.
It’s growing your own vegetables and community gardens and vertical farms and supporting local producers.
It’s rewilding the countryside and greening cities.
It’s getting people active and improving disabled access.
It’s making your own clothes and buying or swapping sustainable stuff with your neighbours.
It’s the right to repair and reducing consumption in the first place.
It’s greater land rights for the commons and indigenous peoples and creating protected areas.
It’s radical, drastic change and community consensus.
It’s labour rights and less work.
It’s science and arts.
It’s theoretical academic thought and concrete practical action.
It’s signing petitions and campaigning and protesting and civil disobedience.
It’s sailboats and zeppelins.
It’s the speculative and the possible.
It’s raising living standards and curbing consumerism.
It’s global and local.
It’s me and you.
Climate solutions look different for everyone, and we all have something to offer.
“And it seems that always in August I am more aware of the rain.”
- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath.
Linda Pastan, The Months
Mary Oliver, from “August,” in featured in Poetry (August 1993)
“Should we tell him the truth?
That he’ll never get over her. Love
is a rock in the surf off the Pacific. Life
batters it. No matter how small it gets
it will always be there—grain of sand
chafing the heart. …
We don’t get over any of it. The heart
is stubborn and indefatigable. And limitless.
That’s how I can turn to my beloved, now,
with the awe the early rabbis must have felt
opening the Torah. And when she pulls me to her,
still, after all these years, I feel like I did
the first time I stood in front of Starry Night.
I had never known, never imagined
its life beyond the flat, smooth surface
of the textbook. Had never conceived
there could be these thick swirls of paint,
the rough-edged cobalt sky, the deep
spiraling valleys of starlight.”
-Ellen Bass, from “Can’t Get Over Her”