Science

Poetry on Environment

| Michele Sharpe
Butterfly on blossom. Photo by Stephen Mulkey.

Like many baby boomers, I recall a time when an unusually warm spring day was something to relish, not cause for anxiety about climate change.

My spouse, scientist Stephen Mulkey, is fond of saying, “Weather and climate are not the same thing,” but it’s natural for folks to experience weather as a harbinger of good or bad fortune, or of the changes to come.

The rainbow, the stormclouds, the hurricane, the cloudless sky, the tornado — all these have an emotional resonance for us. Because climate change is so centered on prediction, we can’t help but tie weather and climate together.

The industrial revolution sparked an interest in preserving the natural environment, an interest that continues today. One poem specifically in response to the industrial revolution is Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur.” Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who saw miracles in Nature and his God’s hand in all of those miracles.

Today, there are a number of magazines centered on environmental concerns that publish poetry. These include Orion, Terrain, and Ecotone, to name a few.

The day the American government vowed to withdraw from the Paris Accord, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change published a new issue (28.2), which includes my poem, Gift Horse. I admit to being influenced by that science dude I’m married to!

Gift Horse

Mid-century, an early spring meant
taking off our shirts between the dunes in April,
desperate as we were to air our skin out
after months cocooned in wool. Even the sand
felt good, scratching our backs. We crossed our arms
behind our heads and watched the mare’s-tail clouds
brush the blue from the sky. Those stretches
of mild weather out of season — such gifts,
we never thought to check their teeth.

Poetry on Weather

| Michele Sharpe

“A hurricane or storm over Yemen” by NASA on Unsplash

Like most people in 21st century America, I’ve lived through a good bit of weather: historic blizzards, historic heat waves, historic hurricanes, historic droughts, historic rains. One thing I’ve never experienced personally is a tornado, but I’m okay with that.

Weather has been a rich subject for poets across all boundaries. No matter our country, continent, time, or season, we all experience weather in very intimate ways. If we commute, the rain or snow can tangle up our days; if we garden, the sun and rain can feed us; if we take our leisure time outdoors, the weather can delight us — or make us miserable.

No matter how old and cranky I get, I remain a fan of the British Romantic poets. Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley is, I admit it, a little adolescent (“A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”), but it still thrills me.

Remember “Who Has Seen the Wind?” by Christina Rossetti?

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind? 
Neither you nor I. 
But when the trees bow down their heads, 
The wind is passing by.

More modern poems about weather include Snow by Naomi Shihab Nye and Flood by Eliza Griswold.

Not surprisingly, poems “about” weather, whether old or new, are often about something else, too. Poets are devious.

Here’s one of my poems “about” weather, in this case, Hurricane Matthew, which raked the Southeast coast of America in 2016. It was originally published in Tuck Magazine, and picked up by a reporter for a regional South Carolina magazine who wrote an article about it, including an audio recording of the poem.

Poetry Inspired by Nature

| Michele Sharpe

Poetry Inspired by Nature

Cypress trees rising from the Ichetucknee River. Photo credit: Michele Leavitt

Nature has always inspired poetry, from early Chinese dynasties, around the globe to Ancient Greek epic poets and early Arabic poets.

In Western literature, the Romantics brought nature poetry to prominence in the early nineteenth century with poems like Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” and Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud. . .”

Nature continues to inspire poets in the 21st century. One of my favorite contemporary anthologies of nature poetry is Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille Dungy.

I’m fortunate to have two dogs who get me out into the North Florida woods almost every morning, and before they came into my life, there were other dogs who got me out into the woods in other parts of the country. Here’s a poem inspired by a northern New England forest, originally published here.

From the Hemlock Trenches

Dear hemlocks, I sit writing your names

on paper soon to be sent back to the pulp mills.

Last night’s condensation froze. The element

 

of ice and the element of morning sun

meet in your needles’ interstices,

where the invasives will feed.

 

I sit writing the dream out

of ice, asking if I may go

with it, back into the air.

 

The forest has changed, meaning it has changed me.

In trenches between the oldest trees,

vernal pools collect the liminal beings.

 

Do not stir the broth, I hear, and then

the jay call, song sparrow notes,

staccato pileated tapping, all

 

rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed.

None of us can do without practice.

We come to the oldest grief each spring:

 

some have not survived. Sacrifice equals

the hope it will release, plus

the weight of carnage.

 

I sit writing the dream

of sugar flowing up the tale of light.

At every pool, one of us is drinking.

Poetry in Form: Sestina

| Michele Sharpe

Poetry in Form: Sestina

Leaves of the same size and shape arranged together. Photo by Erol Ahmedon Unsplash
All formal poetry employs some form of repetition. Human beings have an natural affinity for repetition. Our world, of course, repeats the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of sunrise and sunset. The first sound we ever hear is our mother’s heart beating in a predictable, repetitive rhythm. We like to hear the same songs and stories over and over again.

Maybe it’s my affinity for repetition that leads me to make the same mistakes over and over again!

Sestinas don’t have to repeat a rhythm or meter or rhyme scheme. They only need to repeat the same end-words in six stanzas of six lines each, and then include the six end words in a three-line envoi at the end of the poem. It sounds easier than adhering to a strict meter and rhyme pattern, but I agree with a poet-friend who said “the sestina is the road to insanity.” Try it at your peril.

Here’s one that was published earlier this year in Stirring. The repeated words are killing, understand, might, case, keep, and manage. You can give yourself more flexibility with this form if you choose words that have more than one meaning. The sestina form seemed to fit my subject: scientific experiments which seek to create a reproducible result. This issue of Stirring was edited by Caseyrenee Lopez.

Destructive Sampling

We do it in 10×10 meter plots, killing
the hemlocks to understand
what loss and succession might
look like, in case
the wooly adelgid keeps
advancing north. Will we manage

the loss the way we manage
these plots, in incremements — killing
slowly, girdling tree trunks to keep
the sap from rising up? Will we understand
what makes each tree’s case
unique? One girdled hemlock might

die over winter, another might
hang on for years, or even manage
grim survival. They run on tree-time, a case
of willingness to wait. Killing
them slowly may help us understand
which life forms will keep

rising up as the hemlocks keep
dying. But how might
we predict any outcome? Under one stand
of hemlocks, we manage
insect collection with pitfall traps and a killing/
preserving solution encased

in plastic. To monitor cases
of deer-browse impact, we keep
exclosures so the deer won’t kill
the regrowth. We create scenarios: we might
lose the south, the north, but manage
the east, the west, as we understand

them now, or seasons as we understand
them. Should someone make the case
that time’s advance prohibits managing
the future, that we can’t keep
up with change? That it’s silly to insist we might
keep the old growth safe, once the killing

insects manage to come north? What might
keep us safe when the world changes? Or help us understand
experiments’ results, in case we keep on killing?

Did I mention my partner is an ecologist? This poem is part of a long argument we’ve had over the years about whether or not science (or any discipline) can predict the future. Relationships, like nature, can be rich fodder for poetry.