Mother Earth  Her Whales

An owl winks in the shadows

A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard

Young male sparrow stretches up his neck,

big head, watching —

The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.

Turn it sweet. That we may eat.

Grow our meat.

Brazil says, “sovereign use of Natural Resources”

Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.

The living actual people of the jungle

sold and tortured —

And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called “Brazil”

can speak for them?

The whales turn and glisten, plunge

and sound and rise again,

Hanging over subtly darkening deeps

Flowing like breathing planets

in the sparkling whorls of

living light —

And Japan quibbles for words on

what kinds of whales they can kill?

A once–great Buddhist nation

dribbles methyl mercury

like gonorrhea

in the sea.

Pere David’s deer, the Elaphure,

Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River

Two thousand years ago — and lost its home to rice —

The forests of Lo–Yang were logged and all the silt &

Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 AD —

Wild geese hatched out in Siberia

head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang,

what we call “China”

On flyways they have used a million years.

Ah China, where are the tiger, the wild boars,

the monkeys,

like the snows of yesteryear

Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground

Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.

IS man most precious of all things?

— then let us love him, and his brothers, all those

Fading living beings —

North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders

who wage war around the world,

May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk

Rise! and pull away their giving

from the robot nations.

Solidarity. The People.

Standing Tree People!

Flying Bird People!

Swimming Sea People!

Four–legged, two–legged, people!

How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist

Government  two-world  Capitalist–Imperialist

Third–world  Communist  paper-shuffling male

non–farmer jet–set bureaucrats

Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?

(Ah Margaret Mead … do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)

The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth

To last a little longer

like vultures flapping

Belching, gurgling,

near a dying Doe.

“In yonder field a slain knight lies —

we’ll fly to him and eat his eyes

with a down

derry derry derry down down.”

An Owl winks in the shadow

A lizard lifts on tiptoe

breathing hard

The whales turn and glisten

plunge and

Sound, and rise again

Flowing like breathing planets

In the sparkling whorls

Of living light.

Gary Snyder