2 Poems for Earth Day, Invocation to Nature, Year of the Fire Monkey


Invocation to Nature/C Virus
Peace Amid the Chaos

Nature spare the big-brained ape.
Homosapiens who once challenged nature
with desire for supremacy, mindless self-advantage 
to feed bottomless appetites. 

 Primate selves, echoed large as would-be Masters.
Brought low by your tiniest of creatures?
C- virus mutates faster than human minds comprehend.

 No free human life or living as once were, ever again.
Quickly! From a safe distance, we play catch-up behind mounting body counts.
Mother-father nature will you banish us from this foreign world we thought was ours?
Remake us to fit your Earth.

 Banish this awful virus from human bodies for a reciprocal host.
Gift us a new place in your world order.

S.W.

THE FIRE MONKEY YEAR 2016

When nonspring hop skips past non-winter,  
Suddenly stopped short for 10 degrees,
we are unused to cold.  Denial in snowed minds.
Climate change? El Nino? Farmer’s Almanac
predicted Southern comfort.
Yet what cosmic lint enshrouds
Our clarity, Oxygen,
direction home?
THE RACE IS ON.

NASA’s in. There’s water on Mars.
Virgin Air’s got the Elite
Colonies. Science fact or
Alternate fiction? 
Is the Earth’s core solid, hollowed out,
inhabited by humanoids shy of light?
We live with low-lying slow moving masses of gray
clouds. Glimpses of true blue—
deepen past our midnight as
rockets streak through cosmic muck.
THE RACE IS ON

Money, sex, comfort, technology, titiilations of infinite
minds.  Finite is the unhidden truth, the stilling pulse
of a still living planet in
the Year of the Fire Monkey.
All hail our evolved primate selves, Innovative and refined.
Original, forward thinking, we pursue Excellence.
The sky’s the limit. 
THE RACE IS ON.

Anthracite, black gold
compressed in prehistoric swamps.
Dinosaurs sucked into bog.
Humans smother snug as bugs
in China’s public square, Surrounded by
impenetrable yellow smog, people watch a
movie screen showing a lost blue sky

In New York on a PATH screen are scenes of 
previous year’s lovely snow-dusted streets.
Watched by globally warmed passengers
waiting their infinite now.
But wait!  Maybe it is El Nino?
THE RACE IS ON.

Wherefore the Zen Circle, the Golden Mean 
to restore outsiders to the source? 
Is reclamation yet improbably possible?
Plant trees, when we need instant rain forests?
Clean oceans?  Rescue whales mysteriously beached?
Porpoises cannot escape mesh. Hope more money's 
spent on alternative than fossil fuels? Hope
our children’s children can discover 
an uncinematic blue sky,
yearn for beauty without end?
THE RACE IS ON

The big-brained homo sapien, like primate kin,
fights and kills for territory, food, mates.  Yet 
no other animal knowingly fouls its habitat. 
Full of inquiry, enterprise, appreciation of “perfection,”
Wardens of Paradise Lost. 
Will we ever gaze once more with astronaut eyes at 
the truly awesome breathing world?
Our Earth or in another galaxy
filled with the lucky ones not left behind?  
THE RACE IS ON?

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches
To men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill, but time and chance happeneth to them all.
--Ecclesiastes

This is the way the world ends?  Not with a whimper but a bang?—T.S. Elliott

“Commitment is an act, not a word.—J.P. Sartre

By S.W.

1/21/16


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