Just now I’ve been reading about science’s belated discovery of insect intelligence, even some forms of “logic”, counting, reasoning, and this is being discovered at the same time that science is discovering that insects are disappearing, their “nations” down now by huge percentages… Just as the world is diminishing, we are beginning…to see what we are losing. Has anyone read Ted Chiang’s short story in the voice of a going-extinct parrot, asking why why are we looking out into space for stranger beings to leave us less lonely, when they are all around us right here on our ailing still beautiful planet Earth!
Just now I’ve been listening to Richard Powers speaking (again) about his “conversion experience” from one who has been blind to trees, to one who shaken to the core by their beauty, power and yes, secret wisdom. He just won the Pulitzer for Overstory, about the blindness/hate and love affair of humans with trees.
And just now I am (again!) trying to write about a recent tree/bird experience of my own so hard to express. I’ve been working this morning on a poem not quite finished, I cringe with some embarrassment, reluctant to impose unfinished poems, but because of your question, and because of my so far month-long media fast, because you ask what is in my mind and heart…somehow I also feel now is the time to post it anyway.
Sparrow in the Loped Tree
his round transparent song pierces me—
as I watch them cut, the men who won’t look
at me as they do it because
they remember how I begged them not to—
song restoring me even as I weep, as the severed
branches, as the leaves rain down—
in his song I hear the invisible structures, I hear
what the singer sings from— indestructible
ribs and lungs of Life —
men who cut the tree won’t look
at me as I watch them, weeping, as branch after
branch snaps from the trunk, tearing
the others as it falls–
I hear the intricate structures
of the singer and the song, hear what it means to shine
without light, to generate fire forever
through sound and flesh and bone
appearing, disappearing
passing through the one who is singing
and the one who is listening—
while branch after branch
cracks down—
and sparrow goes on singing