Mother Earth, Her Whales                                      

                                                                        Gary Snyder, 1974

An owl winks in the shadows

A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard

Young male sparrow stretches up his neck,

big head, watching—

The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.

Turn it sweet. That we may eat.

Grow our meat.

Brazil says, “sovereign use of Natural Resources”

Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.

The living actual people of the jungle

                                    sold and tortured

And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called “Brazil”

                                    can speak for them?

                                    The whales turn and glisten, plunge

                                    and sound and rise again,

                                    Hanging over subtly darkening deeps

                                    Flowing like breathing planets

                                                         in the sparkling whorls of

                                                                        living light —

And Japan quibbles for words on

                                    what kinds of whales they can kill?

A once–great Buddhist nation

                                    dribbles methyl mercury

                                    like gonorrhea

                                                      into the sea.

Pere David’s deer, the Elaphure,

Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River

Two thousand years ago— and lost its home to rice —

The forests of Lo–Yang were logged and all the silt &

Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 A. D.

Wild geese hatched out in Siberia

                                    head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang,

                                    what we call “China”

on flyways they have used a million years.

Ah China, where are the tiger, the wild boars,

                                    the monkeys,

                                       like the snows of yesteryear

Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground

Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.

IS man most precious of all things?

—then let us love him, and his brothers, all those

fading living beings—

North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders

                                    who wage war around the world,

May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk

Rise! and pull away their giving

                                    from the robot nations.

Solidarity. The People.

Standing Tree People!

Flying Bird People!

Swimming Sea People!

Four–legged, two–legged, people!

                                    How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist

                                    Government two-world Capitalist–Imperialist

                                    Third–world Communist paper-shuffling male

                                                      non–farmer jet–set bureaucrats

                                    Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?

(Ah Margaret Mead…do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)

The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth

To last a little longer

like vultures flapping

Belching, gurgling,

near a dying doe.

                                    “In yonder field a slain knight lies—

                                    we’ll fly to him and eat his eyes

                                    with a down

                                    derry derry derry down.”

An Owl winks in the shadow

A lizard lifts on tiptoe

breathing hard

The whales turn and glisten

plunge and

Sound, and rise again

Flowing like breathing planets

In the sparkling whorls

Of living light.