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Water can conform to its container, or it can gather in force as whelming as a wave. What will you choose?
Volume 03: Flourish / Collapse
A journey along the axis of abundance and absence, proliferation and putrescence, life and death
An exploration of geographic location and freedom of action and thought
This issue seeks to answer the question: What does “natural” mean now?
To celebrate Earth Month, Parley for the Oceans and Atmos team up for an ongoing eco-poetry series on the connection between the environment and the human experience. In “God of Roots,” poet Ellen Bass writes of the power of the Earth at work—as if there is all the time in the world; that it’s up to humans to save all we can.
WORDS BY ELLEN BASS
in collaboration with parley for the oceans
Meanwhile, the heat and light
of a flaming star rush
93 million miles to reach us,
baby girls are born
with their four hundred thousand
egg cells already formed, otters
keep grooming their guard hair, whirling
the water, working air into the deep
underfur, beluga whales swim
along the Earth’s magnetic field,
chicks pip a circle of holes counterclockwise
around the blunt end of their eggs,
pressing with their feet and
heaving with their shoulders,
larvae eat their way through the soft
mesophyll of oak leaves, leaving a trail
of dark feces in their wake, tart juice
swells within the rinds of lemons,
and under the Earth the god of roots
goes on painting the lustrous fringe
with a brush so delicate—
only one sable hair—as though
there were all the time in the world.
