You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

W.S. Merwin wrote in his poem “Place”: “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.” I think I would add that I would also like to write a poem. Maybe I’d even write a poem about a tree?

Rabbits leap in patterns across boulevards named after trees.

The tarot says let go, change.

ferguson is currently working on a book of nonfiction, The Climate Sirens, about Hurricane Dorian, the effects of climate change on Small Island Developing States, and how centuries of far-flung injustice—colonization and its capillary inequalities at local and global scales—have come to cause the climate crisis.

Certain stories are told in full frog regalia, the music is allowed its wet set of wings and room to lie down.

Wash your mother’s clothes one last time and put them away— like wrapping a scoop of snow in tissue paper.

For months all I’ve wanted is the blessing of an open window.

if we had horns, we’d do your god’s work. we’d lift you in the air. we’d lay you on the green earth. our horns red until rain. //

Because I was terrified, I learned nothing. I had stepped in a papery nest of ground wasps: a hateful swarm of them wreathed up around me and writhed and sang wordless rage. One stung me on the neck and I think I was shocked more than I was hurt: afraid of moving even an inch because that was what the world had become.

We work through the panic into insight. I am learning this again and again.

Resistance is struggle against impossible circumstance, refusal, the will to survive in the face of annihilation; it can also be the surviving remnant enacting revenge.

Why am I still thinking about that woman? Do I also prefer outrage to action? Is it as simple as anger being easier than grief? And oh my God, are you as exhausted as I am from grieving the planet? Tell me what I’m supposed to say about the end of the world.

First come sage, sun- flowers, and bumblebees so pollen-socked they can’t lift off, thus, they lumber over earthstar-perforated patchy grass like unshaved sheep, dodging the dog, who will eat them, sharp shreds of sunflower seeds raining from sparrows’ over- stuffed beaks, and swashbuckling chipmunks catching shreds mid-back-flip and caching them in flower pots. This system? Insatiable. Seriously.

This is the Saturday business of the immense Backyard conglomerate at work. If one listens, one might hear The great, bustling city of it all, The small sirens and screams, The caterpillars backing up, The geckos at their mysterious work.