Sunday Poem #7: Nature is Healing
A poem for my inner 9 year old and those 2020 Venetian jellyfish.
Happy Sunday friends! Yesterday was Earth Day, so here’s a poem about that time I tried to convince all the kids in my tiny Christian school to join my Save the Earth club. I don’t think this one has ever been on the internet before, so consider it a little Beneath the Flood preview!
Nature is Healing
When I was eight or nine
I spoke for the trees—
the pandas and oceans too.
I walked the playground
with my sign-up sheet
asking any kid around
to join my Save the Earth club.
Where did I get the idea
the world needed saving?
How did I go up to strangers
undaunted
asking them to fight
global warming and acid rain
or at least turn off the faucet
when they brush their teeth at night?
A high school fatalist told me
it was all gonna burn anyway.
On the day of the meeting
nobody showed.
Just me on the playground
with the theme song I wrote,
my homemade “Save the Earth”
T-shirt with neon puffy paint,
and all my embarrassed
determination.
But today the world slowed down,
and I read stories about
smog clearing from the skies
and jellyfish in the Venice canals,
and I wondered
if maybe that kid was
onto something.
I went round and round on the title for this poem, wondering if “Nature is Healing” was a little too meme-y and would make any sense in a few years. But I couldn’t think of anything better, so here it is.
Without going into a deep dive of cultural history, it’s hard to explain exactly why I was running around my school’s playground trying to recruit kids into my Save the Earth club. Maybe it was the SeaWorld field trips and the Captain Planet1 reruns. Or the "50 Ways You Can Help Save the Planet” book I got at a school book fair. Or just the sad reality that some of my favorite animals were quickly becoming endangered species, and I didn’t want to live in a world without pandas and manatees.
But today, when I read about climate anxiety, I get it. It was in the air in my childhood, and is even more present for the generation coming after me. This poem was an attempt to tell a little story from my past and link it to our present, and maybe our future too.
I’m no scientist. I don’t know if our collective “anthropause” really healed nature all that much. (when I was looking for a photo for this post, articles I found suggest eh… maybe sort of, but also maybe not.) But still, there’s something beautiful about the possibilities for healing, if we’d just slow our frenetic human pace and look around.
Something about that feels at least a little bit true.
And now the theme song is stuck in my head and possibly yours too. You’re welcome / I’m sorry?