I believe you’ve published all these at Fourwinds, but I must add something to the poignant photo essay “The Albatross around all our necks”

 

 

All We’ve Lost

 

All summer long a tiny shorebird

perched on a slender leafless branch

pointing up to the sky from the steep bank of the cove.

Each morning I noticed the little creature

feeling our kinship as we faced the rising sun together.

The Canada geese are trumpeting now

announcing their imminent departure

as the sun moves along the jagged horizon

on its way south for the winter.

I know almost nothing about birds

yet this morning, looking out at the empty branch

something is missing inside me

a reminder perhaps of all we’ve lost

and the lightness of a feather as the way forward.

 

 

Marking the Equinox

 

There is a saddle of sharply outlined peaks

silhouetting the northern Cascades,

seen from our tiny island in the Salish Sea.

On the autumnal equinox the sun rises

on the southern edge of this saddle

cresting the horizon, marking east

as surely as Polaris sits north.

Ancient civilizations built massive temples,

pyramids and monuments of enormous scale

to record the seasonal positions of the sun.

Modern civilization is beyond this primitivism;

we build vertical towers to honor finance

in violent and unsustainable cities;

construct weapons of war,

technologies for mass destruction

and replica toys to train our children in the art.

We poison the Earth with pesticides and fertilizers,

strip the seas of fish and every signature species,

choke the rivers with agricultural waste.

Nuclear detritus festers without remedy

yet more and more is produced for electrical power;

a brown cloud of noxious gas circles the planet,

debilitating minerals foul our drinking water

and contaminate our very DNA;

pages and volumes are written

on the death of forests, the erosion of top soils

but awareness doesn’t make the slightest dent

in our illusory images of progress and advance.

The ancient peoples made similar mistakes,

their errors hidden below layers of sand

and the bottom of the deepest seas.

Perhaps their monuments to the sun

were the last of their enterprise,

their messages symbols of reverence

and warning to those who would follow

of a higher order ignored at our peril.

 

 

Time to Awaken

 

Entering upon the morning,

the room barely lit

by the first colors of day,

no one is awake to guide the planet    

though we sleep in peace

assured we are on course.

What confidence in the guidance

scarcely acknowledged,

the rigidity of the old beliefs

unable to conform

to the soft curves of her body

or the light rising like vapor in the east.

The birds are stirring

their call and response the first choir

of many voices soon to arise.

What will be our sound, the music

we bring to this beginning?

Leaves ripple as the warmth of the rising sun

stirs the air and spreads through the canopy.

The announcement of life is gentle

but it is time to awaken.

 

 

 

Don Hynes

Poetry website