Scripted by David Hassler
Contributors
Joshua Blaeser, Eden Prairie, MN
Alberto Mestas, San Antonio, TX
Dana Yost, Sioux Falls, SD
Catherine Young, Blue River, Wisconsin
Deborah Miranda, Eugene, OR
Winslow Schmelling, Sonoran Desert
Ryan McGranaghan, Mount Rainier, MD
Kenzie Allen, Midland, TX
Laura Brandt, Maryland
Marianne, Simlångsdalen, Sweden, South Bend, Indiana
Zachary Florentino Murguía Burton, Eureka, CA & Paris, France
Gargi Deshmukh, Mumbai, India
Kevin Shionalyn
In the silken minutia where wonder breaks, we waken—between worlds of measure-taking and mystery-making.
—Kimberly Blaeser
We have only one home, this planet, and it’s blue,
its beauty a bridge to the soul.
Dear sky, dear blue planet,
we grieve, we hope,
we yearn to seek your balance.
From the shifting tectonics below my feet
to the great crying ice sheets of the poles,
how can we find harmony with our world?
I grieve the loss of glaciers
and their ancient hold on the land.
I grieve our indifference
contributing to our own demise.
Each year the hottest on record, summer skies
whitened for weeks with wildfire smoke.
I remember snows thirty years ago
when they came, first tentative, clumped
on green October grass, then full-on-ankle-deep
in November, ours to keep.
The air fragranced with scent, as water
from each place sings its own song of taste.
Tonight, I step out into December’s cold wind
but catch no scent of sweet water’s crystals.
Still, I am part of the sky, held fast by the Earth,
an animated sack of water,
part blue and blue seeking.
I remember a thicket of salmonberries glowing
like new suns in June, a flock of cedar waxwings
singing as they harvested.
I carry this memory of light,
a green day and place,
where matter transformed before my eyes.
When rain stays late in winter
and buries red mountains behind fingers of clouds,
when it fills the saguaro plump with its spiny belly
and quenches the creosote bush so it smells
more like earth than anything I can remember –
it is then I feel hope.
Not an easy hope, but a muscular one.
A hope I cannot measure
but choose to hold in my chest.
I honor the wind picking up at the edge of water in evening,
the solgangsbris, a sea breeze lilting over the fjord,
seen only in the movement of clouds, the shiver
and bend of trees, the bowing of grasses.
I honor you Sun, your life-giving glow,
your song ringing forth in the solar wind's flow,
reaching millions of miles to play magnetic strings,
a lullaby in the aurora. May our gratitude
rise to your creative fire.
I lick the sun, I taste the sky.
I honor all the yielding
and rebounding nature of this planet,
while I grieve the changes around me
that our children will remember as normal.
Yet still I have hope—
hope that we will converge in a space and time,
having followed our own sorrow.
Hope that our collective voices,
braided like sweet grass,
still matter.
My three-year-old grandson draws
a picture of a pinecone, then waves
it high in the air like the new flag
of a world with no borders.
All of us companion travelers,
sailing through space.