They shouldn't have been so eager. Look at you, I say,
you almost dead things, bent over, thrown out of the celebration.
Just look around and see what you could have been if only you had waited.
But who speaks to the flowers these days?
They aren't hiding anything from us.
2
In the early morning, frost catches hold of the new buds that dared to open. Now, thinks the tree,
I'm going to have to do this all over,
but next time the leaves will be smaller, and more vulnerable, and I myself will be the weaker for it.
3
Come out, come out the children beg. What do they know?
4
That all that we behold is full of blessings?
5
But can this really be what Wordsworth was thinking as he hiked around the lakes, making his way from one ruin to another in 1798, or five years earlier
when he stood with his sister beside the same stream, and the wide expanse of Nature spoke to him, not as a poet might pretend, but as he felt it
in the blood, and along the heart—
6
So what do we have to say for ourselves?
When it's hot the plants suffer. When it's too wet—they also suffer.
7
Ah Nature, surely we've betrayed the heart that loved us.
Or to be more precise, could never love us—
not as we wished to be loved, as if we were still children
“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her,” Wordsworth wrote. But nature could never love us, my poem replies—at least “not as we wished to be loved.” Perhaps as children we were a purer part of the world, closer to the life of things. No matter: That time is past. Visionary blessings now look like the work of the imagination—our yearnings and desires trying to find a place in the revisable past.
Join Poetry Daily Editorial Board member Brian Teare for more poetry and conversation about ecopoetics with our third international panel of authors and activists.
British Sign Language-using poet DL Williams writes about the transition from his hearing world upbringing to his creative immersion in BSL. "The first time I saw BSL poetry, it. Blew. My. Mind. It was expressive. It had structure. It was creative. It was non-standard BSL. There were metaphors and hidden meanings. It was poetry and it was beautiful. I was inspired."
"And this is precisely where poetry and poetic communion shelter me with hope without optimism; where, in the different languages inhabited by beings with whom I share the air and water of this planet, we come together in longing for and choosing another way of interweaving, of searching inside ourselves for new ways to reverse this disaster."
