To Sing the Forest's Song

 

Let me sing my song for the struggling world,
a low wolf-howl at midnight
as wolves and bear and deer
pace vanishing habitat
to find a place of rest.

Let me sing of wild salmon, lice-riddled
and cancerous, struggling up-river 
in a migratory trek as old as time,
and of the bear and wolves and whales
who eat them, now going hungry.

Might I sing of tree-fallers
razing ancient forests,
the shriek of the insatiable saw,
the thump as the Old Ones,
here for thousands of years,
hit the earth, roots and
underground networks sorrowing;
birds fleeing in terror, fallen nests
full of babies left behind?

How find a song of joy
in the midst of this madness?

It is Mother Earth Herself
who teaches me to sing.
No matter how stressed, she
rolls out her bounty every spring,
every living system programmed to live,
to heal, to stand upright
after being knocked down -

like we humans, who forget how nature and we
are wrapped in the same skein, attuned to
the same cycles, rising to fall then rise again.
We come from the stars, but it is to Mother Earth
that we return, becoming one with the wind
and the soil and the sea and the sky.

When it is time,
plant something green and growing
on my grave and, when you stand there,
remember: here is one who loved the earth
with wonder. Here is one who said thank you
to every tree and cloud and inbound wave,
to every fluttering bird.
Here is someone with a wolfish,
gentle heart, who walked
with a light tread and sang
the forest's song.

for Brendan's very cool prompt at earthweal: Toward an Eco-Poetry