By Sherry Marr

In 1972, I saw three movies within a few weeks: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Born Free and Siddhartha. Jonathan started me on my journey of personal freedom and my odyssey to the sea. That year, I walked out of my marriage and into the rest of my life. Siddhartha ignited my wide-ranging spiritual quest. With Born Free, Africa claimed a corner of my wild heart forever.

I never got to Africa, but my friend did. She said when she was sailing across the Serengeti in a hot air balloon at dawn one morning, she thought of me. And so, vicariously, I experienced what must have been one of the stellar moments of her life.

There is the Africa of my dreams, set in the past, when it was wild and the great beasts roamed the land. Reading in the soft glow of the lamp at night, I was with explorers inside their tents, listening to the lions roar, to the song of the nightjar, the laughter of the chimps, the call of the great apes.  The Africa of my dreams is the Africa of Out of Africa and I Dreamed of Africa. And, sadly, there is Africa now, writhing in heat, drought, flood and famine, many of its wild ones on the verge of extinction. It is a deep sorrow to see what human carelessness and greed have done – in a few short decades – to the wild and glorious land where life began.

One of my favourite books is Cry of the Kalahari by wildlife researchers and environmentalists Mark and Delia Owens.  Even in 1972, they were hearing distressing reports about Africa. They realized that, if they didn’t go then, there would be little left to save with their research and conservation work. They had very little money but made the leap in 1973, spending seven years in the Kalahari.

The area was then largely uninhabited, since it was so far from water sources, materials for shelter, and other human populations. Their neighbours were the wild ones who, at that time, did not perceive Mark and Delia as the threat humans so soon became.  The couple were accepted in a way few humans experience. Sometimes they woke in their sleeping bags to find a pride of lions sleeping all around them. They relate wonderful stories about the animals they named and lived with and were privileged to observe so intimately.

The Owens formed the Central Kalahari Research Station and published numerous articles and scientific research based on their work there.

The Africa they loved no longer exists. It was disappearing even as they lived there. They watched the impact of ranching, fencing and game hunting decimating the animals. One of the worst things they witnessed was the fencing ranchers built across the greatest antelope migration in the world. The antelope, following their imprinted migratory path, and stopped by the barricade, slowly died of thirst looking through the fence towards the river.

By the end of the Owens’ seven years there, the land was being ravaged for the oil, diamonds and minerals that lay under the ground on which a million creatures depended. Game hunting was growing into a lucrative industry. Even worse is “canned” hunting, where big game hunters can, for $35,000 and a piece of their soul, shoot lions trapped in an enclosure. Rhinos are still being slaughtered for their horns, and other animals are trapped, poached or poisoned to “protect” domestic stock. While the Owens were still in the Kalahari, Lake Xua, the lake the wildebeest migrated to, had gone completely dry. But the wildebeest still migrated there, as was their pattern for millennia.

The Owens’ research was devoted to devising a program for conservation of the ecosystem. They left Africa in order to work towards this end in places where they could better campaign, to raise funds and awareness. On their return to the United States, they worked for their doctorates in Animal Behaviour and were appointed editors of International Wildlife Magazine.

We could have stayed in Deception Valley for the rest of our lives,” Delia wrote, “But such an indulgence would have accomplished little for the Kalahari. We had to process seven years of data, and publish our results for science and conservation.  And we had to make the people of Botswana and the rest of the world aware of the wilderness treasures that lie in the Kalahari.

We had lived through some difficult times in the desert, but the most difficult task of all was leaving Deception Valley.

Sadly, while their work was important and did raise funds and awareness, African wildlife has continued to decline alarmingly. The World Wildlife Fund released a report in 2020 stating there has been a 68% decline in all wildlife species since 1970. As always, scientific data that should alarm and enlighten us, has not led to change among the dominant species, who continue to believe we are the primary species that matters. Yet the decline in other species will ultimately impact our own survival. We are following their course just like the wildebeest, on their way to a dried up lake.

The cheetah, such a beautiful big cat, is at risk. The African elephant is critically endangered, brutally killed for its ivory tusks. The black rhino is also critically endangered, though the white rhino is responding to a recovery program.

African lions, the animals the Owens loved so much, are listed as “vulnerable”, not currently endangered, though three-quarters of their population are in decline. There are only 600 Asiatic lions left in the world and fewer than 30,000 African lions in the sub-Sahara. Between 8,000 and 12,000 African lions are “farmed lions” (two words that should never appear together) – bred and kept captive and suffering in South African facilities. Increasingly, there is less habitat and prey for wild carnivores.

(Honestly, relaying these facts makes me feel nauseous – and appalled at human arrogance and greed.)

A report on the impact of climate change on life in Africa states the country is one of the regions in the world most vulnerable to the climate crisis. Burning fossil fuels and changes in land use are modifying the global climate, with temperature rises and rising sea levels projected for the next 100 years.

West Africa has been identified as a climate-change hotspot, impacting crop yields and production. Some areas of Africa are already experiencing famine. Oxfam and Save the Children issued a report recently stating that more than 23 million people are experiencing extreme hunger in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya – up over 10 million from last year. The region’s worst drought in 40 years is exacerbated by regional conflicts and the pandemic. There is growing food and fresh water insecurity.

Greta Thunberg has stated,

We are in a global emergency, which affects all of us. But everyone is not suffering its consequences equally. Africa is being disproportionately hit by the climate crisis, despite contributing to it among the least. Africa is a key in the fight for climate justice and now faces both huge risks as well as many opportunities to develop sustainable societies which put people and planet first.

Africa is one of the lightest polluters, yet is the country most heavily impacted by global warming. It seems as if people and governments everywhere are so busy responding to what they view as a series of one-time events, we are failing to see it as an interconnected systemic breakdown across the globe.

So where do we go with our challenge this week? As always, it is the plight of the animals that speaks most loudly to me. Humans have more resources than animals do; animals, who are suffering largely because of us, have no voice. They depend on us to right what has gone so wrong.

Your challenge: Give voice to any of the great beasts of Africa who captures your admiration; give voice to their plight. Or, alternatively, write about how human-driven climate change has impacted this country, still so beautiful and wild.

— Sherry

THE KALAHARI

spoke to her

Its red tongue flicking an ancient lingo of omens and signs
Saying, come unpick mysteries of yesterday’s world
long forgotten

The blood stained desert sands wore dry riverbeds like scars
And at night the dunes flowed like a seamless red ocean

The Kalahari spoke to her

The desert lions hunt tonight, it whispered
And she saw them hidden in the shadow of camel thorn trees,
Eyes glowing green under the bright full moon

All around her
The spirits of the ancients rode the night breeze,
And timeless stars painted ancient stories in the sky,
When she knelt down to kiss the art imprinted on rocks
She heard them whisper the breathy voices of the past

This is how the Kalahari spoke to her

– Jody Sky Rogers

THE BUSHMAN SPEAKS

This desert is our life.
From the dry earth we gather roots and melons.
Over the endless sands we hunt the gemsbok and the springbok.

Sometimes the ga roots are shriveled and bitter.
Sometimes men are sick with thirst and hunger.

When there is water we drink and sing and clap our hands.
When there is food we eat and dance and clap our hands.

The eland does not come to us and ask to be eaten –
one must know how to make the arrow and poison it
and where to look and how to hide and shoot….

What man is so foolish as to expect more? To expect
the rain to be always falling, his eggs full of water and
his stomach full of meat?

You have strong animals to carry you.
You have much food and water.
Your digging sticks are hard and sharp.
Your shooting-sticks are like lightning.

You are a powerful man and a good man.
I can see that in your eyes.

But what you offer is a dream.

You can give us water and meat.
You can fill our hands with tobacco and perfect beads.

But you cannot give us happiness.
A man can only drink so much and then he is full.
If a man is always eating honey, he tires of it and becomes sick.

And even if all life were sweet –
what man is not food for lions and dogs?
A man who has tasted in his life no bitterness will find death very bitter.

My mouth longs for sweetness
but sweetness brings bitterness
and in the end they are one.

So I ask you:

Take your digging sticks and your shooting-sticks.
And do not leave them behind.
Go to the green lands you came from.
We shall walk in this desert as we always have.

-Lucius Furius

THE KALAHARI

Kneaded clay
Form creases
The thirst of desert
blinding dust and wind
Collide of wave and tide

Females carry the tribe
Their large flappy ears
Fan them cool
Muddy pools
Their sunshade and lemonade

Their long trunk, their utensil and instrument
The herd graze on green bushes
Barge their way through thick trees and weeds
Making way
For grand and small
Giant footprints and dung mark their tracks

It’s dung a beetle’s nest and feast
The labor of a mother’s womb
Trumpets sound to celebrate
Prey to an open field
Darkness cast upon its young
For it is done
Hearts pump and
Trunks join to commemorate

Rumblings from afar detect danger
They form a protective block around the calves
Their ears on alert
Their trunk and feet test the waters
They wait ‘til it passes

They lock trunks to bond
At the patience of the lions
A son grieves its mom
Guards over her corpse
And leaves with the survived

 Blazing fires rise
The earth crack
The land is barren
The river is drenched
An underground stream arise
They find relief
All come to drink

–  Marckincia Jean

Greetings all, and welcome to earthweal open link weekend #124. Share a favorite poem and then visit your fellow linkers to comment.

The link forum is open until midnight Sunday EST. Sherry will be on June 27 for the next earthweal challenge, which she has titled WILD AFRICA. That should get the deep pot of your imagination simmering!

Happy linking —

Brendan

Jean-Franciois Millet, The Gleaners (1857)

Greetings all,

Special thanks to Sherry for carrying the earthweal load for the past several weeks. I appreciate the break.

In the Northern Hemisphere, we are now approaching the summer solstice, also known as midsummer: High noon for Ol’ Sol. In much of the continental United States of late, we have accordingly been hot! hot! hot! On Thursday (June 16), more than a dozen U.S. cities set daily records for heat; 100 million were affected. A heatwave is also underway in Europe, with Madrid hitting 105F (40.5C) the other day and St. Jean-de-Minervois hitting 40C — the earliest that France has hit that high temperature ever. Here in the U.S., another heat dome is expected next week. For us Floridians, 100 degree heat is rare for all the humidity we’re soaked in, but three afternoons last week nudged the century mark.

Call me crazy from the heat, but the dearth of shadows at this noon makes some things seem most evident. I’ve been watching public hearings of the January 6^th Committee, and in my mind they make an airtight case that there was criminal intent to overthrow the rule of law and declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 presidential election.

Airtight: A showdown not between nuances of fact, but fact and fiction. And yet it’s difficult not to say that fiction will win out — the same way that it’s hard not to say that Putin will not defeat Ukraine and all Europe for the glory of the Russian empire, or that the Earth won’t cook this century and the next and make life on Earth a near impossibility except for some very wealthy people living at the North Pole preparing to move to Mars. That all poetry will be lost in the digital white noise which extracts, with each distracting beep and flash, all measure of the human spirit, down to the one and then the zero.

The clarity of this year’s noon is not one of brightness but the sureness of such darkness.

I sense these things are too close to their tipping points, which means they have already sprung and I am mouthing is what amounts to a nostalgic farewell. But we’re believers here at earthweal, so we have to dig our fortifications against insanity as we can. So let’s dig down to the bare outlines of this week’s challenge. I know it’s there, somewhere …

A child plays in a London fountain to beat the heat, June 17, 2022

How could things seem so hopelessly lost for us? It’s like knowing that every dice will come up snake eyes, that every hand you’re dealt will be garbage. How did fate get such an upper hand over us? How did we lose control over our destinies?

Some say it’s been evolving for centuries. In her June 8 essay in The New Yorker, “The Theft of the Commons,” Eula Biss writes, “The idea that shared resources are inevitably ruined by people who exploit them is sometimes called the tragedy of the commons.”

(For you regulars, we delved into the commons in an April 25 challenge.)

If you’re familiar with the phrase “the tragedy of the commons,” it was coined in a 1968 essay by ecologist Garret Hardin, and his beef was that nonwhite people would eventually bring ruin to all the white people who share in the commons. (It’s now called “replacement theory,” a firearm used by commentators on FOX News.) Biss turns that over to say that the real ruin comes from those who assert their privilege over others. She writes,

Capitalism, the scholar Cedric Robinson argues, was not a revolutionary departure from feudalism but an extension of it, a new permutation. Under feudalism, the English rehearsed a racial hierarchy based on blood and birth, and this was the first stage in the development of an economic system dependent on racism. Later, Southern planters in the U.S. would imagine themselves as landed gentry and their slaves as feudal subjects. Capitalism here was built on slavery, and capitalism everywhere has depended on the idea that one group of people is entitled to extract profit from another, an idea that is often expressed in terms of us and them.

To be landless and then deprived of one’s commons by the rule of law is to be doubly-disinherited, a people with no name or purpose. A short English poem (quoted by Biss) put it this way:

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

It makes one nostalgic for the good old days, but that’s an emotion shot with peril. Good stuff was back there all gilt and rosy, but a lot of other stuff, too. The fabled Earth of our upbringing has a childlike cast to it because we were children, and much was scrubbed from memory (like DDT in spring water and sexual health before Roe vs. Wade) by parents who thought the Disney vision of childhood was a purer substitute for reality. Similarly, political nostalgia for America when it used to be Great sweeps a lot under its rug. It’s great for white people who didn’t have to worry about fairness to the disadvantaged.

Surely though there’s got to be a haunting sense we’re throwing a baby Jesus of possibility out with the stale bathwater of modernity.

John Clare (1793-1864) is a great recaller of the freedom of the commons. He begins his poem “The Moors”:

Far spread the moorey ground a level scene
Bespread with rush and one eternal green
That never felt the rage of blundering plough
Though centuries wreathed spring’s blossoms on its brow
Still meeting plains that stretched them far away
In uncheckt shadows of green brown, and grey

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky.

Such freedom is still privileged; nostalgia probably didn’t resemble anything like that to Clare’s wife, who had to raise seven children in poverty while John was off writing poetry and drifting in and out of asylums.

We might say that Clare was selectively embued with nostalgia but powerfully, especially because he sharply contrasts those motifs in the poem with England’s growing enclosure:

… Fence now meets fence in owners’ little bounds
Of field and meadow large as garden grounds
In little parcels little minds to please
With men and flocks imprisoned ill at ease.

In Clare’s voice the nostalgia seems fresh, for a commons only recently lost. Indeed, Parliament in 1801 passed the Enclosure Act. Biss writes, “the nature of ownership changed within the newly set hedges of an enclosed field, where the landowner now had the exclusive right to dictate how the land was used, and no one else belonged there.” She continues,

“The Wall,” John Berger writes, “is the front line of what, long ago, was called the Class War.” Walls, fences, hedges, and ditches were all used to mark the boundaries of enclosed land, so that sheep could be kept there, or some other profit could be pursued. Enclosure is how nearly all the agricultural land in Britain came to be owned by less than one per cent of the population. In The Making of the English Working Class, the historian E. P. Thompson writes that enclosure was “a plain enough case of class robbery, played according to fair rules of property and law laid down by a parliament of property-owners and lawyers.”

It was the culmination of two hundred years of evolving law to increase agricultural production and render commoners (landless folk who had been permitted to work the land) into proletariats  — walled-off surplus labor to feed into the mills of the Industrial Revolution.

If you haven’t guessed it already, it was also the inspiration for Romantic poetry, and the early greats — Wordsworth, Byron, Blake, Keats and Clare — embraced the natural world as one would a lost God, sublimely. John Keats writes of this in the 1817 sonnet:

To one who has been long in city pent,
         ‘Tis very sweet to look into the fair
         And open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
Who is more happy, when, with heart’s content,
         Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair
         Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair
And gentle tale of love and languishment?
Returning home at evening, with an ear
         Catching the notes of Philomel,—an eye
Watching the sailing cloudlet’s bright career,
         He mourns that day so soon has glided by:
E’en like the passage of an angel’s tear
         That falls through the clear ether silently.

Just to vision a clear sky in the dense coal-smoke of London was rapture.

Biss notes that nostalgia was first used by a Swiss physician in 1688 to describe someone who was categorized it as a disease of the mind which affected the body. A girl he was treating was in a hospital far away from her home. She refused to eat and demanded to go home. He prescribed induced vomiting and bleeding, and if those things failed, to send her home. For hundreds of years it was treated as a mental illness, and as late as 1938 it was described as an “immigrant psychosis” whose only cure was going home.

Indeed, nostalgia is its own enclosure, a bondage to the distant past which locks out all sense of home in the present—especially if one refuses to make a home there.

But is there any alternative? Many don’t think so. Clare didn’t see any hope in what lay ahead, not with it owned by someone else. After writing on in “The Moors” (1820) about the myriad paths that happily meandered the wild, he finds them now closed to commoners like himself:

These paths are stopt – the rude philistine’s thrall
Is laid upon them and destroyed them all
Each little tyrant with his little sign
Shows where man claims earth glows no more divine
But paths to freedom and to childhood dear
A board sticks up to notice ‘no road here’
And on the tree with ivy overhung
The hated sign by vulgar taste is hung
As tho’ the very birds should learn to know
When they go there they must no further go

Thus, with the poor, scared freedom bade goodbye
And much they feel it in the smothered sigh
And birds and trees and flowers without a name

All sighed when lawless law’s enclosure came
And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes
Have found too truly that they were but dreams.

“Lawless law’s enclosure” makes me think of Allan Bloom’s 1994 book The Closing of the American Mind, a critique of the culture wars then raging in academia. (Who knows, maybe they still are.) He believed that the relativism had poisoned contemporary criticism by paradoxically closing off the possibility of a culture defined by critical thinking and advocacy of “what is best.” I sure agree with him trying to plow through the New York Times’ Sunday book review section. Maybe I’m playing cultural landowner here, but we who live now in the land of unbounded choice too often find us scrolling and scrolling finding nothing — a strange displacement.

Call me Luddite, but to me the enclosure of the limitless digital realm seems worthy of rebuttal, a counterforce equal to its white noise. Literature has widely failed — who reads, anymore? — and poetry seems even more arcane. Yet here we are, posting our earth poems every week, celebrating a world we don’t see as lost. Not yet, though I sometimes wonder if we mistake applause for tipping points passing us by.

According to Biss, perhaps the quest of Romantic poetry should be reframed:

Would you go back?” strikes me as the wrong question to ask of nostalgia. The question, as Zadie Smith puts it, is how to “restate the things you find valuable in the past … in a way that’s livable in this contemporary moment.” How to locate the commons in a world that is mostly enclosed. How to recover a tradition of rebellion against monied claims to property. How to use machines rather than be used by them. How to be canny, like the workers of the past, and how to be conservationists, like commoners. We can learn from the time before enclosure, but we can’t go back there. “Time,” the poet Robyn Schiff tells me, “is the enclosure that encircles us all.”

We have several survivals of the commons in our contemporary landscape — parks, especially the big national ones, open to all. Public libraries, with their free access to our civilization’s learned resources. And earthweal, which invites every local poetic eye to help create a global vision.

Naming commons human may be part of the problem. The ocean is a vast interspecies commons interrupted only by meteors, undersea volcanoes and us, our relentless extraction. The forest is a commons. You wouldn’t think of suburbs as a natural commons — chock-full of fences and walls — but step outside and you walk grounds that belong to owls and squirrels, sand and orchid, gators and butterflies who haven’t read our property laws.

The medium of this — at this forum, anyway — is poetry, which brings me now down this meandering path to the challenge of writing contemporary commons poetry. What does it meant to be open, unbounded, united and free in an enclosed world?

Let’s find out!

—Brendan

INTO THE MYSTERY

Tony Hoagland

Of course there is a time of afternoon, out there in the yard,
an hour that has never been described.

There is the way the warm air feels
among the flagstones and the tropical plants
                                                with their dark, leathery green leaves.

There is a gap you never noticed,
dug out between the gravel and the rock, where something lives.

There is a bird that can only be heard by someone
who has come to be alone.

Now you are getting used to things that will not be happening again.

Never to be pushed down onto the bed again, laughing,
and have your clothes unbuttoned.

Never to stand up in the rear
of the pickup truck and scream, as you blast out of town.

This life that rushes over everything,
like water or like wind, and wears it down until it shines.

Now you sit on the brick wall in the cloudy afternoon and swing your legs,
happy because there never has been a word for this,
as you continue moving through these days and years

where more and more the message is
                                                    not to measure anything.

— published in The Sun

INVITATION

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Come in, come in. The water’s fine! You can’t get lost
here. Even if you want to hide behind a clutch
           of spiny oysters — I’ll find you. If you ever leave me
           at night, by boat, you’ll see the arrangement

of red-gold sun stars in a sea of milk. And though
it’s tempting to visit them — stay. I’ve been trained
          to gaze up all my life, no matter the rumble
          on earth, but I learned it’s okay to glance down

into the sea. So many lessons bubble up if you know
where to look. Clouds of plankton churning
           in open whale mouths might send you east
           and chewy urchins will slide you west. Squid know

how to be rich when you have ten empty arms.
Can you believe there are humans who don’t value
          the feel of a good bite and embrace at least once a day?
          Underneath you, narwhals spin upside down

while their singular tooth needles you
like a compass pointed towards home. If you dive
            deep enough where imperial volutes and hatchetfish
            swim, you will find all the colors humans have not yet

named, and wide caves of black coral and clamshell.
A giant squid finally let itself be captured
           in a photograph, and the paper nautilus ripple-flashes
           scarlet and two kinds of violet when it silvers you near.

Who knows what will happen next? And if you still want
to look up, I hope you see the dark sky as oceanic —
          boundless, limitless — like all the shades of blue in a glacier.
          Listen how this planet spins with so much fin, wing, and fur.

— from Ocean, 2018

THE TERNS

Mary Oliver

The birds shrug off
the slant air,
they plunge into the sea
and vanish
under the glassy edges
of the water,
and then come back,
as white as snow,
shaking themselves,
shaking the little silver fish,
crying out
in their own language,
voices like rough bells–
it’s wonderful
and it happens whenever
the tide starts its gushing
journey back, every morning
or afternoon.
This is a poem
about death,
about the heart blanching
in its folds of shadows
because it knows
someday it will be
the fish and the wave
and no longer itself–
it will be those white wings,
flying in and out
of the darkness
but not knowing it–
this is a poem about loving
the world and everything in it:
the self, the perpetual muscle,
the passage in and out, the bristling
swing of the sea.

— from House of Light

Greetings all, and welcome to open link weekend #123 at earthweal. Share a favorite poem and visit your fellow linkers to comment.

The link forum is open until midnight Sunday EST when the next weekly challenge rolls out.

Happy linking!

Brendan