To Heal an Epoch

Do not despair for Earth, beloved. 

    All you know will pass away 

but in the mortal life of Gaia 

    a billion years are yet to be. 

With her a hundred thousand years 

    is as a half a day, 

and a cycle of seasons is just a beat 

    of the pulse that cleanses the world. 

So look to the sea where her cycles reset. 

    Consider the coastal ocean 

where infusion of open sky 

    meets the dissolution of land. 

It happens atom by atom in the vastness

    of a droplet where a thousand algae 

live out their lives basking the paths

    of sunbeams, drawing carbon from the sea.

Out of a thousand, a broken cell settles

    out of the sunlit realm, down through dark

abyssal depths it drifts to oblivion,

    atoms entombed on the ocean floor. 

As seasons crowd the centuries 

    in the stately drift of millennia, 

what happens to microscopic lives 

    clears the air and heals the sea. 

For as sure as aged detrital muck 

    locks carbon into hardened rock; 

as sure as winter’s freeze and thaw 

    and summer squalls carve paths in stone; 

as sure as the Rockies erode to the Plains, 

    sink into seas and rise again; 

as sure as the God of second chances 

    is God of seventy times seven chances – 

Gaia will weave an Eden again. 

Diatoms. Wikipedia image by Prof. Gordon T. Taylor,
Stony Brook University - corp2365, 
NOAA Corps Collection, Public Domain

A Summons

Who will mourn the ‘Age of Man’ 

    when the epoch of Adam is done? 

His dream of dominion has cursed the earth, 

    our sweat has stained the ground. 

We staggered into the Anthropocene 

    where sickness shadows the lands 

and death depletes the seas. 

    When cycles of life are spinning askew 

Gaia cries out for her creatures 

    to tend the afflictions of Earth. 

Listen – set aside your books to hear – 

    she speaks her truths in feral tongues. 

In the howling crown of a wildfire, 

    in the crumbling face of a glacier, 

in the cracking of ice on the Arctic Sea 

    a summons comes to humankind. 

Go make an ark of living earth 

    woven from grasslands, rivers, and trees, 

ten thousand arks across the globe, 

    refugia fit for Gaia. 

Make an ark of the boreal forest, 

    an ark of the chaparral. 

Set aside the high desert, 

   keep the tundra intact. 

Consider each reef a cathedral 

    and every swamp a sanctuary. 

Let lawns revert to meadows 

    and plant a trillion trees 

for a fever flushes the face of Gaia, 

    her time of trials has come. 

Within this age an Eden awaits. 

    In your hands, the seed. 

 Image of Lighthouse, Ribbon Reefs, Great Barrier Reef,
by Richard Ling <wikipedia@rling.com>