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Friday, December 15, 2023

COPout28

Howdy, Poetry Friends!

Busy time here, just as by you, I'm sure--so I just have time to offer a couple of links so you can, if you choose, get a perspective on what went down at the largest climate negotiation ever, COP28.


I trust scientist & communicator Katharine Hayhoe to tell it like it is, with enduring positivity:

https://www.talkingclimate.ca/p/science-vs-greed-at-cop28

I trust Grist to keep its journalistic focus:

https://grist.org/

I trust Earth Justice, because the Earth needs a good lawyer:

https://earthjustice.org/


And now, a poem, not by me but admired by me:

Playing with Bees |RK Fauth

So the world turned
its one good eye

to watch the bees
take most of metaphor
                        with them.

            Swarms—
                        in all their airborne
                    pointillism—
                                shifted on the breeze

for the last time. Of course,

the absence of bees
                                    left behind significant holes
in ecology. Less


                                    obvious
            were the indelible holes
in poems, which would come
                                                            later:

Our vast psychic habitat
shrunk. Nothing was

            like nectar
                                    for the gods

Nobody was warned by
a deep black dahlia, and nobody

grew like a weed.

Nobody felt spry as
                        a daisy, or blue
                        and princely
as a hyacinth; was lucid as
            a moon flower.            Nobody came home


                        and yelled   honey!   up the stairs,

And nothing in particular
by any other name would smell as sweet as—

Consider:
the verbal dearth
that is always a main ripple of extinction.

The lexicon of wilds goes on nixing its descriptions.
Slimming its index of references
for what is

super as a rhubarb, and juicy
as a peach,
or sunken as a
comb and ancient as an alder tree, or
conifer, or beech, what is royal
as jelly, dark as a wintering

hive, toxic as the jessamine vine
who weeps the way a willow does,
silently as wax
burned in the land of milk and

all the strong words in poems,
they were once

smeared on the mandible of a bee.


Keep bees on your mind even in this dead of winter, and thanks to Janice for hosting
us today at Salt City Verse!


9 comments:

  1. The roots of my perennial pollinator plants are stretching toward this poem....thank you, Heidi!

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  2. This is Patricia- I’m stuck on words without poems. The Cascade effect is thunderous. Ouch. Thank you Heidi.

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  3. You link the loss in nature to the dearth of words/images available writers--another ripple effect of climate change. Clever perspective. I hope COP 28 produced something we can be optimistic about. I look forward to reading the references you provided. Happy Holidays, Heidi.

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  4. Wow. Airborne pointillism. So much beautiful, bittersweet imagery. Thanks, Heidi.

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  5. I have been watching the COP28 news, find it quite a lot of blather while, as the poem's words tell us, the bees tell more than the 'experts' about our world. To set goals years ahead feels like parents telling their children "maybe later". Thanks for the links, Heidi.

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  6. Thank you for your focus on climate. You are right -- the earth does need a good lawyer! You keep an eye on the tiniest among us. : )

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  7. Wow, it's so true! What would our language be without bees and flowers? So many people's lives are already deprived of these things, it seems ... but the thought of them disappearing forever is horrifying! Ruth, thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

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  8. Thank you for this, Heidi. Your words speak volumes about the need to preserve and protect.

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  9. Thank you for the links! And, what a poem...my goodness...the verbal dearth after extinction. Taking most of metaphor...indelible holes in poetry. It's a sharp poem...but also good.

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Thanks for joining in the wild rumpus!