earthweal weekly challenge: ANIMAL POETRY

Posted on March 7, 2022 by earthweal

Late last year, when it looked like American democracy was falling apart and feeling helpless and aswarm (beyond voting, there was little I could do ), I took to my early morning walks like Mad Sweeney in the trees, repairing to the green sanity and its welcome. Grounding myself in the canopy of trees, my perspective changed; out from the venal chatterbox and at a humble height to a wisdom which spreads from deep roots to treetops up near the stars.

SWEENEY IN THE TREE

My dream hatched me
in a tree—not branched
but in its pith of trunk,
rings growing out from me,
roots dowsing with my feet.

I was growing where
poetry spreads its forest,
a gut-stringed lute
buried standing up
in a vast threnody—

half greenwood henge,
half psalm library.

Come sing with me

I strummed with leaf and bough
my voice the canopy
of a root rot trench
which hallows I in Thou.

December 2020

I wrote a lot of poems about this in the coming weeks. Most are collected in my self-published book The God In the Tree; my point here is that by carrying the trees’ message, the carrier was changed. Becoming a more rooted, greener and wilder creature, my poetry found its Ben Bolcain, that glade where Ireland’s lunatics of old found respite and repair.

Turns out I was wild all along. Here’s Gary Snyder in The Practice of the Wild:

Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo of looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet elements relaxing, staring, reflecting — all universal responses of this mammal body. They can be seen throughout the class. The body does not require the intercession of some conscious intellect to make it breather, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating, it is a life of its own. Sensation and perception do not exactly come from the outside, and the unremitting thought and image-flow are not exactly outside.

The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us. There are more things in mind, in the imagination, than “you” can keep track of — thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream.

The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track of some of what goes in and out (and sometimes making expansionistic plans), and the rest takes care of itself. The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild. (17-18)

Here at earthweal we have devoted many challenge of late to the wild: the sacred wild (or green fire); wild mind; the wild dark. I’d like to take one league further into this wilderness and explore wild poetry or the poem as animal, our wild connection to the world.

Here are some examples:

PROCESS

May Swenson

Lie down upon your side
and fold your knees
end your hands at the wrist
against your chest
as a cat or dog does in repose

Close your eyes and feel
your brow smooth out
like a smallcloth in the wind
or a brook slipping
to a gentle waterfall

Now wait for what will happen
Something will

Beneath this hill of breathing hair
a steep mine
Within this ear
oracles of echoes seep
Wide and clear the eyelid’s dome
a galaxy where suns collide
and planets spin and moons begin

Words are birds perceived
in a secret forest
Fed by nerve and vein they hop
from twig to twig and up
an ivory ladder to the top
where it is light and they remain
and are believed

BEND, TEND, DISAPPEAR

Rumi (transl. Coleman Barks)

This is how you change
when you go to the orchard
where the heart opens.

You become
fragrance and the light
that burning oil gives off,
long strands of grieving hair, lion
and at the same time, gazelle.

You’re walking alone without feet,
as river water does.
A taste of wine that is bitter and sweet,
seen and unseen, neither wet nor dry,
like Jesus reaching to touch.

A new road appears without desirous imagining,
inside God’s breath:
empty, where you quit saying
the name and there’s no distance,
no calling dove-coo.

A window, a wild rose at the field’s edge,
you’ll be me,
but don’t feel proud or happy.

Bend like the limb of a peach tree.
Tend those who need help.
Disappear three days with the moon.

Don’t pray to be healed, or look for evidence
of “some other world”:
You are the soul
and medicine for what wounds the soul.

5 AM IN THE PINEWOODS

Mary Oliver

I’d seen
their hoofprints in the deep
needles and knew
they ended the long night

under the pines, walking
like two mute
and beautiful women toward
the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and
went there. They came
slowly down the hill
and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly
they stepped
closer and stared
from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp
tassels of weeds. This
is not a poem about a dream,
though it could be.

This is a poem about the world
that is ours, or could be.
Finally
one of them—I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.
But the other
stamped sharp hoof in the
pine needles like

the tap of sanity,
and they went off together through
the trees. When I woke
I was alone,

I was thinking:
so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.

It is the fur of the poem which pelts us for rough nights and dangerous ways; ears and nose to read the night’s sound and scent semaphores; powerful legs for carrying us fast toward food or safety; a heart big enough to love no matter how much it hurts; and an ethical, equitable mind. As Snyder writes, the animal body works in the animal mind; both are wild. And the animal poem reckons with this changeful, dangerous and ever-sweet world with an intelligence greater than knowledge. Let’s give it a try.

For this challenge, write an animal poem, ensouled with the animal body in your animal mind. You can embrace the extra-human wherever it is found, in beast, fish, tree, land- or seascape or star canopy.

Brendan

earthweal weekly challenge: WHEN ANIMALS SPEAK

Posted on January 4, 2021 by earthweal

by Sherry Marr

I recently read a fascinating book titled Animalkind – Remarkable Discoveries About Animals and Revolutionary New Ways to Show Them Compassion, written by Ingrid Newkirk and Gene Stone.

It tells wonderful stories about all manner of creatures: an albatross, the first living being to circumnavigate the globe; chimpanzees who defeat college students in computer games; a horse trained to choose among various symbols to indicate whether he would like his blanket off or on, or would like a snack. Trainers described the horse as being excited by now having the ability to communicate and express preferences.

The authors describe an Australian sheepdog trained to retrieve – by name – 200 objects. When told to retrieve an unknown object, he correctly deduced that the unknown toy he had not seen before must correspond to the unfamiliar name. Deductive reasoning. So smart. I was smitten, hearing about the tiny desert mouse, who places a stone outside her burrow in order to drink the early morning dew.

Animals are delightfully amazing. And they seem to have a sense of humour as well. I have seen this in dogs and horses I have known. They also exhibit pure compassion and devotion, beyond what humankind seems capable of. This is why it breaks my heart that so many millions of living sentient beings are treated so brutally by humans, who often tend to view them as resources, property, put there for our use, creatures without feelings, rather than part of an ecosystem in which each one has its place and purpose and right to exist.

People who work in abattoirs or vast factory “farms” must tell themselves they are “dumb beasts” who don’t feel pain. But all we have to do is look into their eyes to know they feel every emotion we feel: pain, grief, fear, sorrow, terror, as well as joy, happiness, contentment and love (those who are more gently treated.)

“An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language,” said Martin Buber, the German philosopher. The authors of Animalkind pose the question: can animals love? We all know the answer to that.

I have seen a dog lie on an owner’s grave and sob with grief; a horse lay his head on his person’s casket, and weep.

Source: Thula Thula

While I was writing this, I read a wonderful book, The Elephant Whisperer, by Lawrence Anthony, the story of how he accepted a herd of wild elephants at his vast wildlife reserve, Thula Thula, in Zululand, to save them from being killed. They arrived traumatized at being removed from their familiar territory, and, only 48 hours before, having seen their matriarch and her baby being shot. Mr. Anthony was determined to save them, hoping patience and stability would settle them down. They broke out right away, causing local rangers to allow him only a short time to turn things around, or they would be killed.

He set up camp beside the fence of their compound and stayed day and night, trying to gain their trust. At 4:45 every morning, the elephants would tense, facing the direction of their homeland, preparing to break out. Each time he pled with their new matriarch, Nana: “Don’t do it, girl. They will kill you if you get loose. This is your place now. It is a good place. Please stay.” This was repeated every morning, for some time. Each time, Nana seemed to reflect on his words, understand, and decide not to break out.

Then, one morning, she came right up to the fence. Intuitively, Mr. Anthony went to her, overcoming his nervousness. She looked at him with her wise, old eyes, and reached out her trunk to whuffle at him. Trust had forged its bond. He then decided he could let them out of the boma, (their early compound), into the wider expanse of the sanctuary, which has now grown to 4500 hectares. “Something happened between Nana and me,” he writes, “a moment of connection. It gave me a sliver of hope.”

Trust grew among the herd, which settled in and did not try to escape again.

We know elephants, like whales, can communicate across vast distances, sometimes at ultrasonic frequencies humans can’t hear. Their rumblings can be felt traveling underground by other herds for as much as six kilometres. Mr. Anthony noted that they somehow intuited across vast distances when certain important events occurred, such as the birth of his sons, or his return from a trip abroad. They came to meet his babies, as they had come to present their calves to him. They always came to welcome him home.

Mr. Anthony writes, “In our noisy cities, we tend to forget the things that our ancestors knew at a gut level: that the wilderness is alive, that its whispers are there for us all to hear – and to respond to.” At the end of his book, he summarizes, “The most important lesson I learned is that there are no walls between humans and elephants except those we put up ourselves. Until we allow not only elephants, but all living creatures their place in the sun, we can never be whole ourselves.” I agree.

When he died suddenly of a heart attack in 2012 at the age of 61, twenty elephants walked for twelve hours to his house, where they stood for two days and two nights to pay their deep respects in his honour.

To make this even more uncanny, Mr. Anthony died away from home, in another country. Yet the elephants, many miles away across the reserve, somehow knew he was gone. His wife, Francoise Malby-Anthony, in her book An Elephant in My Kitchen, wrote about this: “We hadn’t seen them in months. Why now? Why this exact weekend?….To me, it makes perfect sense. When my husband’s heart stopped, something stirred in theirs, and they crossed the miles of wilderness to mourn with us, to pay their respects, just as they do when one of their own has died.”

Even more astonishing, on the same day each subsequent year, they marched to the house again in his honour. This Knocks. Me. Out. Elephants never forget a kindness, and we know that elephants grieve. (To find out more about Thula Thula, click on this link: https://thulathula.com/history/)

There is a larger landscape
than the one we see.

—Sarah Ban Breathnach

We’ve all read stories of dogs traveling great distances to return home, or re-unite with a beloved companion. Howie was a Persian cat who traveled 1,000 miles across the Australian Outback to return home. Truly remarkable.

Dolphin skin is so sensitive, it can feel sound waves in the water; their echolocation and communication system is highly evolved, much of it, as with elephants, beyond the human auditory range. The noise of boat motors and propellers must be excruciating for them.

I found fascinating the authors of Animalkind’s explanation that the mystery of flight begins, not in wings or feathers, but in birds’ light, hollow bones that make it easier to lift. The bones are full of tiny air sacs that take in oxygen independent of the lungs, which allows the birds to sustain the energy needed to fly. I didn’t know that. Bird songs serve a practical purpose; they call mates, find their flock, scare intruders, warn about predators. They use distinct notes in correct order.

The authors explain that fish feel pain and are aware of themselves as individuals. I have a friend who tapes pictures to her fishbowl, and says her fish spends time looking at them; it shows interest when the pictures are changed for new ones. Wow.

My grandson, at the age of nine, turned vegan, saying, “I don’t want to eat anything that has a face.” He is a man now, still not eating anything that has a face.

We are sharing the world with feeling creatures. This is why it hurts my heart when I read about the excruciating lives so many animals live under human domination.

The words of Jenny Leading Cloud of the White River Sioux speak to me:

“The buffalo and the coyote are our brothers; the birds, our cousins. Even the tiniest ant, even a louse, even the smallest flower you can find – they are all relatives. We end our prayers with the words Mitakuye Oyasin – All Our Relations – and that includes everything that grows, crawls, creeps, hops and flies on this continent.”

I long for the day when enough of the population awakens to the plight of animals to demand legislation to protect these gentle beings. The beyond-human realm is vast and largely unregulated. We scroll past the horrors; we can’t bear to look. But once we know, we can’t not know that a world of sentient beings who cannot speak are telling us in every way they can that they need our help and protection.

For this week’s challenge, speak for animals, or let the animals speak. You can write about wildlife refuges, the need for them and the challenges. Or choose an animal and write a poem in its voice as a non-human being. What is its song, what does it love or fear or need? How does the climate crisis impact it? I am waiting with both fear and anticipation to find out!

— Sherry

earthweal weekly challenge: WHAT HAPPENS TO ONE, HAPPENS TO US ALL

Posted on November 30, 2020 by earthweal

by Sherry Marr

I was fascinated when I first learned about the re-introduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, after an absence of seventy years, and how this impacted, in what is called a trophic cascade, everything in the ecosystem, ultimately actually changing the course of the river.

Nature is amazing!

A trophic cascade is a series of consequences, starting at the top of the food chain, that affects all the species lower down.

Yellowstone Park was created in 1872. Poachers, hunters, tourists and park rangers were free to kill wolves, who were considered a nuisance and given no protection at all. By 1926, wolves had vanished from Yellowstone.

The park began to suffer from the absence of wolves. There was an increase in grazing populations, and human efforts to cull the herds weren’t successful. Areas along riverbanks were denuded, soil erosion occurred, and small species withdrew.

Scientists argued for the re-introduction of wolves into the park, but park rangers were opposed. In 1967, wolves were classified as endangered. But it wasn’t until 1973 that U.S. Fish and Wildlife were required to do something about it. Years of studies were begun, working towards a restoration program.

Paul Nicklen, National Geographic photo

Finally, in 1995, fourteen wolves were captured in Alberta, Canada, and introduced into Yellowstone. The results were astonishing. Grazing herds moved away from the riverbank to less open locations. With less grazing, forest regeneration stabilized the slopes; there was less soil erosion. Pools started forming; rivers became narrower. The wolves had impacted the physical geography of the entire park.

This all blows my mind. They say the increase in songbirds, beaver, and small animals like gophers and ground squirrels, which fed eagles and hawks, was amazing. Landscape that had been grazed bare became lush and green once more. Willows grew and spread. The area healed and grew into a paradise.

Best news of all, to me, is that wolves were removed from the endangered species list in 2009, as their numbers had become sustainable.

This is all marvelous to contemplate, and makes me ponder how every species has its important role to play in the working of whole ecosystems. The participation of each impacts the health of the whole. Or, as my Nuu chah nulth neighbours teach: Everything Is One. What happens to one, happens to us all.

Here is a little-known fact: salmon change forests too! One doesn’t think of salmon as having a connection to the forest. But eagle, bears and wolves all eat salmon. Fish carcasses and the droppings of the animals that eat salmon are compost, adding necessary nitrogen to the trees and the forest floor. They keep forests thriving. Here on the West Coast, our salmon stocks are dying out, because of climate change, warming seas, over-fishing, and, especially, pollution and disease from the open-pen fish farms in the area. First Nations have been advising of this danger for decades, yet governments are slow to act in legislating fish farms into contained land-based locations. I fear our salmon will go the way of the cod stocks of the eastern seaboard before long.

The Nuu chah nulth people have lived off salmon for ten thousand years. It only took greedy settlers a couple of hundred years to plunder everything into near-extinction. I can’t imagine, as outraged as I am by environmental degradation, what it must be like for the original people of this land – its caretakers and guardians – to watch everything being destroyed: salmon dying out, forests being clearcut, everything being paved over in an accelerating rush to grab it all before it all is gone. I am astounded by how patient the First People are, and how willing, still, to talk to us and try to help us learn.

It saddens me to reflect on the outrageously heavy and disproportionate impact our human species has, the harsh toll it is taking on the non-human realm – who have as important and necessary a role to play as we do in an interdependent ecosystem, and as much right to life.

“Mother Nature provides for our need,” a local Chief often repeats, “but not our greed.”

Let’s think about this for our challenge: Share any example you wish of a human or non-human being, and the impact it has on its surrounding ecosystem. Share your wonder, your despair, your hope, your respect: whatever this challenge brings up for you. I look forward to being amazed.

weekly challenge: MESSAGES FROM THE WILD

Posted on July 20, 2020 by earthweal

Port Alberni owl

guest post by Sherry Marr

The heart that breaks open
can contain the whole universe.

—Joanna Macy

Mother Earth is sending us urgent messages in wildfire, floods, tornadoes, the CO2 index, and record-breaking temperatures. The wild ones, too, are speaking. I think of Tahlequah, the mother orca who carried her dead calf on her nose, in grief, for seventeen days and could not let her go. The Tla-o-quiaht people, here in Clayoquot Sound, teach that every creature is a being, as worthy of life and respect as we are. They tell of an orca who accompanied the boat carrying a dead chief all the way to his island home. They believed the orca was the chief’s brother, come to accompany him on his final passage.

One of our online poets had a three-day visitation from an owl, recently, who chose her yard in which to do her dying. I believed at the time the owl carried a message for her. The poet, sadly, was diagnosed with cancer soon after. It sounds like it has been caught in time, perhaps thanks to the owl, who gazed at her intently, soul to soul, for the days she visited.

Two weeks after my mother died, I was driving towards her farm when, (it felt like in slow motion), an owl flew across my windshield, so close I could see every feather. Her head was turned towards me and our eyes met as she made her passage into the forest, still looking back at me. It felt like time had slowed. Somehow the car was still moving and on the road, yet I can still feel the slow suspension of those moments, our eyes locked. I knew an oracle had been, with a message for me from my mother.

I have a poet friend who is visited often by wild creatures. She has dreams filled with the cries of the wild ones, who bring her messages because she is a seer, a woman of the drum, who can carry their voices to the rest of us.

I worked for many years at a First Nations healing centre where families came to heal from addiction issues. We had a ceremony called the Healing of Memories, where we gathered in circle around an outdoors fire, and people wept as they threw their written messages of pain into the fire, to lessen their burdens. Eagles never failed to show up and circle slowly overhead till we were finished.

I lived with my own wild one for fourteen years. Pup was a wolf-dog, found at the healing centre, close to death, as a tiny puppy. I took him home and fed him and he grew. He was a wild one, and he led me a merry chase! He did not want to leave me when he died. The next morning, right around the time his body was going into the flames, I woke up feeling his snout on the edge of my mattress, and heard his gentle whuff, the way he had woken me for all those years. He had come one last time to say goodbye. This still makes me cry.

These days I am hearing of rivers being given the status of personhood, to protect their rights. Our opportunity now is to recognize what indigenous people have always known, that everything has consciousness: the sea, rivers, trees, animals. We need to save the wild, not just for ourselves, but for all the wild ones of every kind: animals, birds, sea creatures. All our relations.

We have seen the photos of starving polar bears in the melting north, sometimes only skin and bone by the time they expire. We heard the cries of the burning koalas and kangaroos of Australia. But then another crisis came, and another. The pangolin and the barbecued monkeys and dogs from the wet markets of Wuhan have brought us a profoundly life-altering message in the corona virus. We did not heed earlier warnings, so the lessons are being repeated more strongly.

For today’s challenge, let’s contemplate messages from the wild.

Have you had an encounter with or a visitation from a wild creature? Do you have a totem animal with whom you identify? Or do you share life with a less-wild creature, and have a story to tell about communicating with another species? For we do communicate with them, and they with us, as any dog or cat or horse-lover understands very well.

Write whatever comes up for you. There is sadness in how the wild ones are suffering. But there is also such wonder and privilege in sharing this world with them; such gifts given us by the animals who honour us with their trust. Since their messages are non-verbal, we have the opportunity to speak for them. You might wish to relate an encounter. Or you might speak as a particular wild creature, as we do in the Council for All Beings, giving voice to what the animals wish and need us to understand.

The animals hold my heart, always, so, whatever you write, I will read your poems with such delight.

weekly challenge: CONNECTING HUMANS, WILDLIFE AND THE CORONA VIRUS

Posted on April 13, 2020 by earthweal

Typical Wet Market in China (Getty Images)

By Sherry Marr

As you know, my heart is always with the animals, wild and domestic. Anderson Cooper of CNN recently interviewed Dr. Jane Goodall, who said she hoped the corona virus pandemic would soon be over. Then she added, “I hope and pray that the nightmare will soon be over for the wild animals who are captured and kept in horrible conditions for food. Our too-close relationship with wild animals in the markets, or when we use them for entertainment, has unleashed the terror and misery of new viruses, viruses that live in them without harming them, but mutate into other forms to infect us.

“We have amazing brains,” she continued. “We are capable of love and compassion for each other. Let us also show love and compassion for the animals who are with us on this planet.”

Music to my ears. But will humankind listen? Have we learned anything from this? Stay tuned. I have a discouraging answer to that question farther down in this feature.

This virus has made clear as never before how interconnected we all are with the natural world and the other species we share the planet with. We know now, there is a direct connection between the wild animals in the wet markets of Wuhan and the corona virus. The pangolin (scaly anteater) and the civet are said to have played a part in transmitting it. Researchers say it likely originated in the Chinese horseshoe bat.

In wet markets, people buy and eat such things as barbecued bats, monkeys, cats and dogs, all kept in terrible conditions. They look out through the wire in terror, knowing they are about to die a horrible death. They are killed in ways too brutal for me to relate. We don’t want to know this. It makes us uncomfortable. We prefer to look away. We can easily imagine the distress of a single human in this world that we have made so difficult to live in. Each individual animal feels the exact same fear, pain and terror that we do. They haunt me.

Some of our North American practices in our factory “farms” are as brutal as anything we cluck about across the sea.

Because I know that animals feel everything we feel, because I have seen their tears and I hear their cries for help all over the world, I can’t turn away. I bear witness. I sing the song of their desperate lives, hoping enough of us will hear and come to their rescue.

We are now paying the price of wildlife trafficking. The bill has come due. The demand for apes, for bush meat and body parts, for elephants, rhinos, big cats, giraffes has brought us to this moment. The pangolin is one of the most trafficked animals on earth. Who would have thought our fates would intertwine? These are creatures that belong in the wild, whom we have interfered with terribly. Now seven tigers in captivity at the Bronx Zoo in the U.S. have the virus, infected by their human handler.

As early as 2007, studies warned “wet markets are a time bomb for a virus outbreak”. And this week both the White House coronavirus expert Anthony Fauci and U.N. Biodiversity Chief Elizabeth Mrema called for a global shutdown of all wild animal markets, “to prevent the next pandemic.” Oh my goodness.

Here is where my heart sinks. China did order the wet markets closed when the virus broke out. But they re-opened as soon as lockdown regulations were relaxed.

Let that sink in. How discouraging, that we learn nothing from what we live through. How frustrating that profit continues to be the driving force, above survival of the planet, its people, and the other beings whose survival is totally at our mercy. Mea culpa.

As citizens of our global village, the protection of our environment equals the protection of our future, and our grandchildren’s. The laws we create to protect wildlife will also protect human communities. A shift to restoring the earth to balance will create employment, through alternative sustainable livelihoods that do no harm. This will create more successful human communities.

Compliance will be a problem; the wild animal trade is peoples’ livelihoods. We need to develop artisan markets, tourism, wildlife protection and land stewarding jobs instead. The UN chief noted that the risk is of driving the trade underground, making it even more dangerous and less regulated.

In the short window of time remaining before we pass the tipping point (which feels ever nearer, to me), we need to make every effort, personally, nationally and globally, to heal the harm we have done to Mother Earth. We have seen how quickly the natural world responded, when we humans took our feet off the gas pedal and stayed indoors: she began to heal, skies cleared, waters grew cleaner. Mother Earth has been sending us messages in every voice she has, telling us she was in trouble. With this virus, perhaps she has finally gotten our attention. I hope so.

We have seen how governments at every level, faced with the global threat of the virus, have come together. Everything else was set aside to address the problem which threatens our lives. I hope they will do the same for the climate crisis, when the virus subsides, for it threatens us every bit as much. I think of wildfire season, not that far off, with foreboding. Governments and everyday people have shown we can step up with courage, determination, and with full and loving hearts, when the cause is urgent. I have to hope that on the other side of the crisis, we will address climate change, of which this virus, our global appetites, and the voracious maw of capitalism have all played their part.

For your challenge: as always, I keep it wide open. Write about whatever this sparks in you: our connection with the natural world and with the wild, your fear, anger, hope, love of animals, domestic and wild, or your frustration at humanity’s slowness to grasp our shared predicament. Never did we think we would be living through times like this. How is the virus affecting you?

Bring us your words, experiences and feelings about these difficult times we live in. Be assured, we will read them with deep respect.