WORDS BY ELLEN BASS
in collaboration with parley for the oceans
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.
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.
