Earth Day
“It’s true that landscape forms the mind. If I stand here long enough I’ll learn how to sing.”
I love this picture. It’s of seismologist, Frank A. Perret listening to the Solfatara Volcano in Italy in 1917 and it’s from the title page of the 2011 Folio edition of Richard Fortey’s, The Earth: An Intimate History.
It makes me think of jazz musicians when they do that back and forth thing - the musical conversation they have. Call and response, I think? In a Gilliamesque Monty Python haze, I see Perret answering earth’s call by putting the amplifier up to his furry, waxed, hipster lips and yelling out the lyrics to, “I Can Hear You” by They Might Be Giants.
Sadly, mankind’s musical response to the earth’s song in recent decades has been more like the Python’s giant foot.
Now, more than ever, we need to learn how to sing. So, here’s to #EarthDay and to #EarthDayEveryDay. And, also to this wonderful poem by Diane Ackerman. Courtesy of Poetry Foundation
Natural Wonders
The old moon lying in the young moon’s arms
lives in the shadow of her crescent light
and yet he rounds her out, shields her from harm
as she ripens in the star-encrusted night.
Almost a Tao sign, they embrace with limbs
luminous and stark, wedded by less
but braced by design. The arch is their symbol:
a strength made from two weaknesses.
When lightening strikes a beach, it burns the sand,
turning it to glass, and those who wander
along the shore find shards of frozen fire
like flattened ziggurats - fossil lightening -
which some call “fulgurites,” and others know
by names more fanciful or dire, and some think
live inside dragon bones, and still others hold
aloft, to shield their eyes from a sun whose flames
are distant and hotter but kill just the same.
In extreme cold, snow forms as “diamond dust,”
a sun rime I’ve watched in Antarctic skies
where the surgical wind blows sharp as a scalpel,
the frigid air’s too tight to cloud, and yet
moisture ices itself up, cascades and flies
in a continuous shower of spine-tingling sparkle.
Even in winter-waxed New York, flying
through blizzard, often the air’s fishbowl clear;
then one can survey from the sky’s high shelf
- despite the ice-claws, whirlwinds, and gusts -
and see how the battered earth holds herself
calm in time and place and diamond dust.
