Monday, April 22, 2013

Earth Day

Oh battered blue ball, you dusty eye –
you crinkled skin – you knob of a world,
scudding recklessly on solar winds;
falling toward a star that is
falling toward the center of a
falling galaxy: Oh my dear, sad, beaten thing:

Home of all homes, sea of all seas –
your secret fire, your burning nickle and iron heart
your scabbed skin of puckered continents,
your incontinent earthquakes, throwing bookshelves
and glass onto Japanese sofas–

Oh dear sweet wavering poisoned darling,
shuddering with the heave of time, crawling
with humans earnest and evil, cankered and sublime,
shaker of faiths, herald of covenants,
flooder of basements, spinner of
magnetic webs and borealic fancies –
Oh, whirler of cloud and rainscape,
twirler of lightning, sower of darnel and grain,
windsweeper, deathkeeper, infolder of hallows –
my poor dear
dirty-faced boy:

come, come home: your dinner is ready,
the light is going, rest
is sweet.

9 comments:

Kathleen said...

Gorgeous, glorious, sad, and sweet. Thank you.

Dale said...

Thank you dear!

mm said...

This I will come back to. One reading is not enough. Gorgeous.

Dale said...

Thanks mm!

Rouchswalwe said...

Emotions well up reading your verse. Beautiful bittersweet words.

Dale said...

Thanks so much, Rouchswalwe and Jo(e).

(There's a poem beginning to grow up around my Englishing of your moniker, R.: I make it Smoke-Swallow. It must be Old Germanic, of one sort or another?)

Nimble said...

moving and full of word pleasure (surely there's a german word for that)

Rouchswalwe said...

O! Happily I anticipate it ... my nickname as a girl was actually 'Rauchswalbe' or the diminutive 'Rauchswälbchen' but since it was already taken when I began my blog, I dove into Middle High German for 'Rouchswalwe' ...

Nimble asks about a German word for "moving and full of word pleasure." I don't know of one offhand, but would suggest "Wortgemütlichkeit" ... what do you think?

Dale said...

My German is just Schuledeutsch, RS; your guess is much better than mine!