The Dark but Starlit Heavens

I find myself upon a seat

That flies above the spinning sea

At thirty thousand feet,

A little world, enclosed but free

From all the surface conflict stirring

Beneath what I can see,

The broken lines between us blurring

As we together brush the sky,

Our common hopes enduring

To land once more where shores are dry

With safety and stability,

But still the ground will cry

For greater hymns of harmony.

Might we prefigure what we need

When in the clouds’ tranquility

We set aside our greed

To glimpse the dark but starlit heavens

That shine on one humanity?

I just got back to the US for some December vacation – had some hectic airport experiences, but the flights themselves were nice. Flying often makes me think about the connections between places and people, and this poem gets at that idea.

In What Seems Small

I search for oceans vast and teeming

Or rivers running full and fast and wide.

What else could circumscribe your dreaming,

Which knows the time and course of every tide?

 

She stands, instead, beside a tree

And watches as the rain is lightly gleaming

Beneath the golden sunlight, free

From breaking clouds whose outer shells are steaming.

 

I wonder what her mind is thinking

To focus on so small a symphony.

What majesty could she be linking

With tiny beads of liquid mystery?

 

Then suddenly, I see it all

By following her eyes, whose gaze unblinking

Aligns with one about to fall,

One drop that holds the world before its sinking,

 

A lens delaying on a leaf

Before its contents splashes with the call

Of gravity, while I in disbelief

Find you reside still more in what seems small.

This poem is about the idea that even things that seem small contain infinite complexity and beauty. There's a book I read several years ago, written by the Dalai Lama, called "The Universe in a Single Atom", which looks at relationships between Buddhism and science. I think a possible alternative title for this poem could be a less extreme version of that book title - "The world in a single raindrop". 

Purple Periwinkle Petals

Purple periwinkle petals

Upon the trees and scattered on the street

Adorn this space of fired bricks and reinforcing metals

With softness, scented sweet

Like honey on a summer’s day.

Their influence is subtle and discreet

When juxtaposed against constructed gray,

Yet still reveals our hardening conceit.

Purple periwinkle petals

Upon the trees and under striding feet

Perhaps will make us stop and think of how our progress meddles

With biomes once complete.

 

This poem was inspired by light violet flowers that were blooming in trees near my apartment not too long ago. They filled the trees, and eventually covered the ground beneath them. At the same time, there is a fairly large construction project happening on a neighboring plot. With my tendency toward environmentalism, I couldn't help but think about how projects like that, whether a building, a road, or something else, carve up, cover over, and isolate pieces of the natural world, often, perhaps, to the detriment of the ecological relationships and systems that existed long before our construction equipment arrived.

Groundwater

Our water comes from underground.

We lift it up to great renown

With callused hands that pump and make it fly.

 

The tumbling of its rushing sound

Reverberates throughout our town

And brings relief when mouths are running dry.

 

But as our growing streets abound

With life, we threaten soon to drown

The well’s capacity to get us by.

 

Our water comes from underground,

But every day we’re drawing down

The level that remains of our supply.

 

No other sources have we found

Untainted by a dirty brown.

We must preserve what droplets lie

Pristine within the spaces underground.

There are many environmental challenges facing the world - one that's closely related to the kind of work I do concerns diminishing groundwater supplies as populations grow and water demands increase. These supplies can be replenished, but the time scale is often much slower than the rate at which we pump water out of the ground. Of course, this can be an especially critical issue in places where water access is already relatively low, and people may need to resort to less pristine (and less safe) water sources to meet their needs. This poem imagines a growing town with a handpump that brings up groundwater, which I think is a fairly common scenario. As the town grows, the water levels decrease, and it becomes more and more important to figure out ways to preserve and replenish what remains.

Home

A home that stands without four walls,

Its ceiling blue and white, and black as night,

Its floor, here soft, there hard, which sprawls

Beyond the reaches of my farthest sight,

 

Its shining lights, from moon and sun,

Illuminate its new and ancient scars.

Our task: to mend what harm we’ve done,

Inflicted on our home beneath the stars.

 

I've been reading some environmental writing lately, which is probably why this topic has surfaced often in my recent poetry.  I think this one's fairly straightforward - focused on preserving this world that we call home.

Now in Harmony

Today is nothing less

Than any other day upon the Earth.

So why do I digress

From now, assigning to it lesser worth

Than days enmeshed in memory

Or futures built on nothing but projection?

I need to heed the harmony

That comes from every moment’s introspection.

Here's a short and fairly simple one for this week, but I think the message is still important. This is certainly something that I struggle with often, looking forward to or being concerned about things that might happen in the future, and thinking back to past experiences. This undoubtedly has value, but it's also important to be present in the moment. I've been trying to get better at that through things like meditation...

Falcon Flying High

Falcon flying high

On a backdrop of sapphire sky,

What do you spy

Of the world here below?

What catches your eye

In row upon row

Of engineered surfaces

Static of flow,

With ill-defined purposes?

Forests used to grow,

Here banyan, there birch,

And each you could know

When gliding in search

Of a perch

To consider

The world here below.

 

One of my favorite poetry-related things is when I go out for a walk, and by the time I return, I have a fully-formed (or nearly fully-formed) poem in my head ready to write down. That's how this one came about. I went for a walk today, and a few minutes in, I spotted some birds circling high in the air. This is a common sight here, but it got my wheels turning, nonetheless. They weren't falcons, but a falcon fit well into the language of the poem that was developing. By the time I was climbing the stairs back to my apartment, the last line was coming into my mind.