The great sigh of our still blue marble

Climate Change

• It is the great sigh of our still blue marble:

• Each new storm a gasp for air,
• a crying out from the rivers of truth
• that are poisoning our political seas.

• Who makes time to consider
• the wild salmon struggling,
• despite everything, to make it up stream

• who attends to the whales
• whose blow holes
• are clogged with plastic,

• Or listens to the sea
• which used to be filled with poems?

Adaptation

• Massive violence may well be
• the predictable constant of our universe:
• stars exploding,
• asteroids colliding,
• plagues and droughts . . . .

• each one inviting new ways
• to adapt to survive and create

• as the primordial process plunges itself
• into that cauldron of roiling wonder

• seeking alignment with everything that has gone before,
• and co-evolving in ways that aim

• to transform destruction
• into something unimagined
• and yet so astonishingly new

• it seems woven into the cellular fabric
• of the great cosmic loom

• as it creates a universal tapestry
• we recognize as both
• both particular and true.

• with gratitude to Brian Swimm

Michael S. Glaser served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2004–2009 and is a professor emeritus at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Editor of three anthologies and seven collections of his own work, he also co-edited the Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. More at: michaelsglaser.com