After Learning That Not a Single UN Biodiversity Goal Was Reached by 2020,
I asked the seventh-graders about climate change
and one said it’s over, there’s no future,
and one said, there’s no one to trust, no one cares,
and one asked, what part of the Anthropocene isn’t suicide?,
so this afternoon I take my sadness down to the wetlands,
and walk among the coots and cattle egrets and Canadian geese.
The promise of another storm crouches in this Western sky.
I want to convince my students that a day like this,
with its brilliant mess of birdsong and atonal calls,
its array of clouds doubled in ditch-water,
is a mercy we never earned. That the earth is generous
like that, packed tight as a grenade with beauty.
And even if the million species nearing extinction
darkens everything alive, there are flocks of geese
flying over this marsh rusted down to red, tufted islands
of reeds set out like cushions on the shining lakes.
I don’t believe that humanity will make it right in time.
But those kids are alive today. And I wish I’d driven them
here to stand with me in the rarity of being, looking up
at this vastness trumpeted and wailing and made of wings.
Too Late Pastoral
What light did to the day
could still startle us—sky and field and marsh
shot through with sun. Especially in late January,
too late really, to be heading
into the park, but we did, we knew the trail,
the granitic cliffs red and rising straight up from sand,
the sea turning molten. We stood
for an hour and watched the surf knock
at a heron’s thin silhouette, gusts tossing her crest-feathers.
It was good then to walk back
in the near dark, through the almost gone hills
and fields. Almost too late, so we stayed to watch
the land hold the vanishing,
last summer’s star thistles bowed in wind, a felt sense
of animals waiting for the last of our kind to leave.
Stages of Grief
Tattered, sun-dead, there is no river anywhere
I look. There is dust, whole forests of sun-
burned reeds. And a silver-haired woman
stopped dead on the trail. Her adult son holds her upright,
her walker behind them. I think when drought ends,
rain will take one step towards green, then another.
I think soon the driest season must drown, one cloud
broken into, then another. A mile in, we glimpse it—
grey-green, slow, carrying sludge and algae and snag,
but carrying on. Quiet there. At the edge of an empire
shutting down, we stand a long time. The shallows
shuddering as a great blue heron rises. Green vines
and willows on the far shore. After a while,
we turn back to the trail, back to the woman
and her son. Though not certain if it is the same place
or a few steps further on. A little fear just behind
the temptation to go on exactly as we are. After all,
it’s just a glimpse of river lugged and choked,
but a river still. And these hours at day’s end
conspiring towards belief—birdsong raining through
the cottonwoods, a sun so gold, so easily gilding it all.
Julia B. Levine’s poetry has won many awards, including a 2021 Nautilus Award for her most recent poetry collection, Ordinary Psalms, (LSU press, 2021), the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU Press, 2014), as well as the Anhinga Press Poetry Prize and The Tampa Review Poetry prize for her first two collections. Widely published and anthologized, currently she is the Poet Laureate of Davis, California, as well as a 2022 American Academy of Poetry Poet Laureate Fellow for her work in building resiliency in teenagers related to climate change through poetry, science, and technology.
Header photo by Lester Graham, courtesy Shutterstock.
