The recent units in the college course that I am taking have focused on caring for the Earth.  One of the assignments for this week was to take walks outside and look at the sky, keeping in mind the reading that we did on climate change and the affects of human living on the health of the planet.  I wrote a poem in response.  I think when I have time to review and revise it as a poem, I want to work some more with the image of reversal that my son brought me when he declared it to be backwards day.  What reversals are possible?  What grace is there in the reversal?  What wishes for the future?

Wandering the Hill to Consider the Sky

Here in the hollow,
though still expansive
the sky is relatively small–
a blue bowl upended
on the green bowl here below.

Here in this lower bowl,
down in this green hollow,
we see the world pass above us.

High up, like white sharks
swimming near the ocean’s surface,
the small white forms of jets,
some days leaving their trails
behind them as they fly,
delivering their human cargo.

Below the planes are sometimes
eagles wheeling high
or peregrine wandering
the thin currents.

A layer lower, and the geese
remind each other of the journey’s peril,
calling to orient the family,
to place themselves in the context of flock.

And here, hardly another tree-height
above the trees, the robins and their ilk
come skimming each night in October,
a long low parade, in constant groups of twelve or twenty,
neverendingly to settle in the trees
which nestle deep within the glen.

I am always struck by how the horizon holds the sky here,
gives it weight, cloud-lined at the edges,
and by the layering of the high clouds above,
wispy whispers behind the summer thunderheads
and scudding puffball clouds of autumn.

It can be hard to imagine, here,
how we are harming it, to picture
the burden we’ve asked it to hold.
Some days–when Spicher sprays the southward fields,
or Fisher, up-ridge to the north, lights his burn pile
and the smell of burning plastic rolls down the hillside
like water, while the black smoke rises upward
like some dark mockery of what was once required for holiness–
some days, perhaps, it’s all too clear, here,
what we are doing to the sky.

It’s easy, some days, to ignore the smell of fumes
from my own shiny blue tractor,
my big red farm truck, my trusty old Buick,
easy to excuse my own acceptance of the way things are.

Here, now, on the ridge top,
eastward, looking outward,
the sky opens up and I can see
the hills across the River,
though that blue ribbon is hidden
deep beneath my line of vision.

A jay is calling from the dead oak
and little birds are chipping in the brush at woods edge.
Up here the sounds are more distinct and come from further off.
To west, a dog at Tome Farm across the hollow,
and more dogs from the kennels two hollows to the east.
And the trucks from the highway, from Route 30 and the bridge.

Once, driving along the ridge,
I watched a cloud come roiling up from southward,
like an omen of something sinister,
to settle like a hen over our hollow.
What does the wind carry,
besides geese, besides leaves?

Where do the winds take my leavings and litterings?
Where do the waters bear my dross and detritus?
Like the cobwebs of contrails that scar my sky,
I leave my own mark in the hollow and far beyond it.
What shall be my legacy of use and misuse?
The heritage I bestow upon my children:
consumption and dissipation?

Or will the webs be finer, more gossamer?
Like those of the spider who charts a course
across the spaces between the poplar and the sycamore,
those sentinels whose seeds nourish the wanderers
flitting through the highway of trees that run through the hollow?

Down from the hilltop now,
I turn my gaze from the sky to the henhouse,
and three eggs for breakfast.
A small boy has come from the house
to tell me that today is backwards day
and I must walk backward around the barn
until I bump into him,
coming reverse from the other direction.

After we dutifully collide,
we find chestnuts there.
He eats one,
and buries the other:
a wish for good luck.