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Welcome to Week 43 of Be the Change!
Another Earth Day has come and gone without action on climate. While we wait for Congress to--hopefully--pass some sort of climate legislation before the midterms, I've been working to scale up Capital Good Fund's green lending programs, and writing poetry about climate change. Not much else to do for the moment. Capital Good Fund just installed a 24 kilowatt solar array on our roof, and financed our 10th solar system for homeowners in Rhode Island and Massachusetts--with more to come. I'm pretty proud of that :)
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I hope you enjoy these poems, and please forward this to your friends and ask them to sign up too.
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I’ve had my head in the clouds so long
I don’t know how to climb back to my body.
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In dreams my head is buried in the sand
and I make no effort to lift it.
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Down below, somebody who goes by my name
cracks his knuckles and goes to work.
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I admire him, how he furrows his brows
and picks his nails. I admire his anguish, what stress
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has done to his complexion and mood. He is busy
fighting in ways I cannot fathom, here amidst
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the mountaintops and forest canopies, at peace.
But if I reach down and touch his jugular, I recoil
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from the rat-tat-tat of his burden, wonder what flowers
he will have saved in time to adorn our grave.
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See my prior Earth Day poems:
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“From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 44 percent.” – The Atlantic
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When I was your age
I walked three-hundred miles to school
through rain or heat, dodging missiles
and speeding cars.
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(this was when we treated
rain as a nuisance, not a miracle)
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When I was your age
I watched the Twin Towers fall over breakfast
and for weeks a replay of the collapse
on every TV, as if on a loop.
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When I was your age I suffered from acne, too,
was warned that if I got bad grades, dropped out,
spent too much time on poems, the sky would come
crashing down.
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(have they warned you it might crash down regardless?)
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By now I’ve lived long enough
for the days to feel like a rerun
of a TV show I would watch on those summer days
when school was out and it was too hot
to play outside.
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What I mean to say is, it doesn’t get better, or worse.
For example, last night I couldn’t sleep. At 3 AM
I heard my son dreaming in his crib;
what wonders flitted through his mind, I do not know;
nor did my wife and dog stir when I got up
to look out at the aging, crumbling world,
the leaves so delicate and dry
a word said in anger might
denude a forest of hope...
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Can you see the stain of my tears
on the window?
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