You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

by Ada Limon

NO ETHICAL TRANSITION UNDER LATE CAPITALISM Large hypodermic syringe, peat/vermiculite soil, water, soy plants, 132” x 12” x 12” Inside the needle’s clear chamber, a microbiome. Water and loam and seeds swarming to life. Where it seems as if nothing should grow. The soy sprouts stretch and press against the confines of this artificial sky—their irregular terrarium—roots balled to tiny children’s fists. Seeing this, I wonder if the plunger is glued in place to prevent escape. To prevent what little water seeping away. I don’t have to check to know the roots are rotting, crept through with mold. Soon, the seedlings will drink this place dry, feast away the nutrients, and starve themselves, unknowing. If I had to hazard a guess, the artist will replace this syringe with another, and then another, when no one’s looking. The metaphor is clear, crystalline. Elsewhere, these plants would be harvested and processed. Byproduct stamped with a brand name, peddled by a corporation built on blood and colony. On miles of olive orchards bulldozed, uprooted, razed for monoculture crops. The medicine I swallow every morning. My gender, distilled and sold to me at market price. Each needle, each pill, a seed planted in my body. The roots they grow there, inextricable from theft. From the pooled blood of a stranger. Even if I abandon this medicine that keeps me breathing, the company still makes a killing.

SUMMER SONGS The rain, of course, as it dings every leaf on the eucalyptus— what was it doing there, on the US- Mexico border, so far from its native lands? You might have asked your grandmother that question, she too so far from home, she too singing in her beloved Purépecha tongue— Mederush cancahuish nirash Inguia. Again, I’m going to sit and drink. Drink what? The rain. The sorrow of thirsting for sounds that take us back among our kind. Is this why she sat beneath that tree all day, sweating in the heat? To water the soil, to plead to the tulips— they too displaced—grow! grow! grow! Oh, desperate wish. If they didn’t burst open all spring, not a chance in July. Then again, who would have guessed a tree from Australia befriending an Indígena from the mountains, here in the arid and dry Sonoran Desert. Then again, the miracle of summer rain and your grandmother’s song inside that song. And the tulips aching to be free, hum hum humming along.

On the Golden Record that’s out of the solar system now, scientists deemed the sound of birds important enough to include as a marker of our planet. Listening this morning to a clip of what someone or something might hear one day, I can’t help but wonder if they’ll even know what it is. Maybe they’ll think it was the language we spoke to one another to say what we longed for, the language we used to say one day when I’m gone, and you’re out among the trees, please, please remember me.

I am inside such a cloud. This is how I know I won’t ever believe in heaven if heaven isn’t right here, with you. Our sunflowers keep coming back, year after year after year, since that first year we drove seeds under our new yard’s soft soil. That, dear heart, is it. It is the softness I need

And in the Netherlands, magpies and crows are turning hostile architecture into homes, constructing cyberpunk nests from anti-bird spikes— strips of sharp metal pins meant to keep them from perching on buildings. I’m definitely rooting for the birds —they’re fighting back a bit, said the Dutch biologist studying the phenomenon.

The ranger is still talking about lichen: they colonize harsh environments, infiltrate and wedge apart pieces of rock, serve as food in times of stress for mammals, including humans; birds use lichen for nest-building. Lichen are possibly the oldest living things on earth. We will outlive them. Mir veln zey iberlebn—

the grapes contained, in each form, the memory of the land and the hands that remade them. The monks, without doubt, thought we took this memory into our form, each body and mind willfully, though rarely willingly, revised and, night after night, devised from an idea, the seed of it. We, to that end, could taste and experience everything everything had been and been through. Did you? I’ve begun to believe the present, like the shadows on the water, twisting, doesn’t have to be a form the past took. The past has taken so much. Must there be more to give, to give back, to get on, or away, from this? My memory moored me. Lifting, now, my cup to yours, my eyes to yours in the light cast by the dark, I don’t know if I can be known like that. Fresh snow. Clouds of smoke. Flight without wings. Tower. Kings

STAIRCASE I’m not coping very well, but who is, really? I’m somatizing stress, sleeping badly, eating too much candy, drinking too much alcohol, forgetting to exercise or hydrate properly, falling behind on everything, and the sun today is an alarmingly dull shade of orange, a well-cut circle of marigold construction paper in a pale rust sky. I am looking directly at the sun because the ash clouds from the wild fires a country away have settled over this place so thick and so heavy that the brightness and the yellow have been stripped from the sun’s rays before they reach my eyes, the particulate haze bouncing back the splendor, diffusing it. The news says that being outside today is the equivalent of smoking five cigarettes, but I can’t stop staring at the egg yolk sun because it feels, I don’t know, important, like I have to bear witness, like seeing it will make me persuasive on questions of climate change and political action, or something, so here I am inhaling this carcinogenic cloud of oxidized carbon when clearly I should go inside and close the windows, drink some water, meditate, do some yoga, read a book, anything really that is not standing here staring at the sun, breathing in cancer, letting my mind wander to the woman next to me on my flight home from Ohio last week, who kept repeating hoaxes to me as though they were true. I hadn’t spoken to a stranger on a plane in years, and it was nice to feel social, to enjoy the seatmate serendipity of air travel, and ...

Ecorage ecodispair

And then the day came, when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. — ANAIS NIN

Blossom when you’re ready, but rough. Be quaint explosive.