When I think of the world my granddaughter will live in if we don’t save it, I fear and try to hope. I offer what follows with thanks to
and her Earth Day project with and with thanks to publisher Erica Drayton.The losses may seem small but will be grand and devastating.
The Future of Nature” is an Earth Day community writing project for fiction writers to explore the human-nature relationship in a short story or poem. It was organized by @Claudia Befu and @Julie Gabrielli, and supported with brilliant advice from scientists @JDTonkin andand @betweentwoseas. Also @rebeccahooper. The thoughts and the poem you’re about to read is from this project. You can find all the stories as a special @TopInFiction Disruption edition, with thanks to publisher @EricaDrayton.
Here’s my hope:
School
Remember promise
in giant red doors
you saw
while your knees shook
at the edge of the playground
with book bag and lunch pail, cold
from the thermos of milk? The sound
of the future
in the creak of the bindings
of black and white speckled notebooks?
How hope smelled in the wood
of sharp yellow pencils?
Remember how long red
margins ruled
down the side of lined paper
you titled “My Summer Vacation”
and you learned
at hard desks
how to write
in narrow white spaces of weather, and clothes,
and long days at the beach—
not of skies bursting color
like peaches and plums
or birds’ feet on sand
like the sweetness of time.
watercolors by Mary L. Tabor
Love,
A pencil pokes a hole into the ground. A bean seed planted to sprout.
A fertile stalk with flowers, harvests sun rays and bees, nourished they grow, progeny produces food and there's the home of the future watered with kindness of rain and teaches that care.
For me, every day is another Earth Day, but I don’t always reflect on those distant moments of childhood. Thank you for an artful poem that takes me back in time. ❤️