I Report to The Earth
BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
Again, this day, you were raining.
Again, your beings with eyes
were met with enough light to see.
Every place they turned toward,
some tenderness answered.
Under barbed wire,
under sirens,
in rain, your mosses deepened their green.
Your newspapers, this day again,
held their ink.
A few nouns and adjectives changed.
You sang, this day as always,
your terrors and tenderness,
your drowned and your swimming,
your houseless and hungry,
your lucky and fed.
Sang orcas, sang Verdi,
sang proteins altered,
made to fluoresce when active.
Your rocks – basalt, limestone, feldspar –
sang almost imperceptibly slowly.
Your glaciers – more quickly –
their turning to streams.
Some parts of you were able to listen.
Some parts were able to weep –
a sound somewhere
between
morning bird calls and millstones.
I speak with history.
BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
I know it has always been thus.
That somewhere, someone not separate from others
each moment enters your kiln, your smelter, your furnace.
Continual and irreparable, your inventions.
Continual and irreparable, their need for fuel.
For us. A burning born into. Of indescribable pain.
We know this.
And still, with respect, I request: that you, history,
your stories and murals, your thrown-dice choices,
might step out for a coffee, slip into a nap in the shade.
That some might, for a moment, forgive you.
Is the choice not also worthy, even heroic—
to find beautiful, like any other minor and thirsty mammal,
one moment’s ripple of creek under trees?
In The Great Emergency
BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
When the day comes that it will be asked –
if there are askers –
In the time of the Great Emergency,
what did you do?
Someone will answer –
if there is someone,
if there are mouths and ears –
In the Great Emergency,
the leaders turned off the sirens.
The scientists who studied the lake ice
went out in winter to fish.
Horses starved. Donkeys lived.
Cassandra learned to play the piano.
For beauty, too, was with us.
With trembling hands,
it lifted the charcoal and drew.
Request
BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
When I say the pronoun I,
I request you to ask:
which one.
The shoes of one self
may or may not
fit the feet of another.
One’s sense of the comic
may lower the eyes
of the rest.
Journals, letters,
notes at the backs of books—
these are fata morgana.
The street address working
for two or three
is for others, knocked at unanswered.
And if this I now saying you,
who seems to be me,
strikes you as muddled,
myopic, mistaken,
I ask you:
forgive in advance
its forgetfulness, clumsiness,
misplaced longings.
Another, a different self,
will come, given time.
Though it, too,
will be one small part only
of an untellable story.
A single, scouting ant
wandering a star-filled, spinning,
and spiral-armed kitchen,
from which it may
or may not bring back
to the nest
some coffee cake’s
yellow, sweet-buttered crumb.