There is no moral of this story—there is only light and sadness. There is no moral of this story. It’s just a moment in my life where I did something wrong, and the earth, who has never not known what love is, held me anyway.

HOMESICK: A PLEA FOR OUR PLANET

In the fifth grade, I won the science fair

with a project on climate change

that featured a papier-mache ozone layer

with a giant hole through which a papier-mache sun

burned the skin of a Barbie in a bikini

on a lawn chair, glaciers melting like the ice cubes

in her lemonade. It was 1987 in a town

that could have invented red hats,

but the school principal gave me

a gold ribbon and not a single bit of attitude

about my radical political stance

because neither he nor I knew

it was political. Science had not yet been

fully framed as leftist propaganda.

The president did not have a Twitter feed

starving the world of facts.

I spent that summer as I had every summer

before, racing through the forest behind my house

down the path my father called the old logging road

to a meadow thick with raspberry bushes

whose thorns were my very first heroes

because they did nothing with their life

but protect what was sweet.

Sundays I went to church but struggled

to call it prayer if it didn’t leave grass stains

on my knees. Couldn’t call it truth

if it didn’t come with a dare to crawl

into the cave by the creek and stay there

until somebody counted all the way to one hundred.

I thought one hundred was the biggest number

there was. My mother absolutely blew my mind

the day she said, One hundred and one.

One hundred AND WHAT!?

Billionaires never grow out of doing that same math

with years. Can’t conceive of counting past their own

lifespans. Believe the world ends the day they do.

Why are the keys to our future in the hands

of those who have the longest commutes

from their heads to their hearts? Whose greed

is the smog that keeps us from seeing

our own nature and the sweetness

we are here to protect? Do you know

sometimes when gathering nectar, bees fall asleep

in flowers? Do you know fish are so sensitive

snowflakes sound like fireworks when they land

on the water? Do you know sea otters hold hands

when they sleep so they don’t drift apart?

Do you know whales will follow their injured friends

to shore, often taking their own lives

so as not to let a loved one be alone when he dies?

None of that is poetry. It is just the earth

being who she is in spite of us stamping

barcodes on the sea. In spite of us acting

like Edison invented daylight. Dawn

presses her blushing face to my window,

asks me if I know the records in my record collection

look like the insides of trees. Yes, I say,