“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” – Walt Whitman
“The microscope and the metaphor are both tools of discovery” – Jane Hirschfield
“No one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry” – Rachel Carson (Nat’l Book Award speech for The Sea Within Us)
One benefit of being a Poet Laureate is that I get invited into school classrooms to present a workshop, teach some poem writing, and support the class curriculum, whatever that may look like. In Truckee at Sierra Expeditionary Learning School, students and teachers blend disciplines to study how a theme may act through the many lenses of learning. What does climate change look like through the lens of science, and what does it look like through the lens of poetry? These were some questions we used this week to talk about endangered animals, climate warming, glacier melting, plastic pollution, and energy use on our planet and in our communities and habitats.
I loved meeting Lorenzo Worster's 6th grade class this week! We talked about how internal rhyme, slant rhyme, and end rhyme each make a different form of reptition, sound and music in a line of poetry. We investigated the specific details of the big picture, and we shared our poems out loud as a way to remind each other of our shared experiences. The exciting culmination of their poetry and science project is a collaboration at the Roundhouse Maker Space. The poems will be engraved on large stones and then the students will create a garden of stones and poetry speaking to the planet outside their classroom.
We turn to science to ask questions that have answers. We turn to poetry for questions that we cannot answer but still require response. Both are acts of discovery, both are distillations that take important information and put it into systems that are understandable. Both are needed in times of crisis. Humans are curious and discovery is a joy.
Here is a poem we read that blends science and empathy, that I find inspiring, by one of my favorite poets:
Characteristics of Life by Camille Dungy
A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say
scientists.
—BBC Nature News
Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you
I speak for the snail.
speak
of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
of
life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.
I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
I
speak
from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.
Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you
one
thing today and another tomorrow
and I will be as consistent as
anything alive
on this earth.
I
move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.
Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent
as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful
and useless if that's all you know to ask of me.
Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances
between meadows of
night-blooming flowers.
I
will speak
the
impossible hope of the firefly.
You
with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must understand
such wordless desire.
To
say it is mindless is missing the point.
