350 Writers

350
by Diane di Prima

impenetrable as the air we will be
left with, soon the air will be
impenetrable as the ground. The basis or
foundation call it. we think what's under
our feet dependable. we are too eager
to try it, stand on it, "stand
up, stand up for your rights" we
sang not long ago. now the ground
melts and shifts, it won't support us,
support our weight. watch earth become mud
spherical mudslide slithering over magma core, see
the green ice flicker, shrink and disappear.
Wish you were here. I do so
wish dodo bird was here, wish orangutan
red man of alchemy was here to
stay, like our love, wish the taiga,
the Siberian tiger, Great Barrier reef and
all the rest of it would hang
around, like those brave desperate warriors of
New Zealand. What is to be done?
as Lenin asked. Image and body can
wake us up—as no number will.
Pitch in. Read poems at rallies. Stand
guard over plover eggs at Daytona Beach.
I keep thinking of sunrise over Greenland
from a plane. I keep thinking of
the aurora borealis. how it fits the
palm of my hand like the spotted
owl. Blue butterflies on San Bruno Mountain.
Anything at all is reason enough to
act. Eyes of your grandchild or some
ten-year-old you never met in the ghetto.
No difference. No way to know either
of them. No way to turn away.
AND DO WHAT? YOU GOT AN IDEA?
Three hundred and fifty parts per million
of what? We can't see them, can't
touch them, don't have any idea of
what to do with them. They don't
bare their teeth in my ancient limbic
brain. Or what you call the world's
information bloodstream. I do know no number
will bring us together, get us moving.
Take home a baby rhino. Undam the
Yellow River. Stop burning rainforests for food.
Dream. Pray to the elements the five
Great Mothers, our universe. Ask more questions.
Build an ice floe for a family
of polar bears. Unplug one day a
week: stay home, tell stories, make love. . .

On the Side of the Bears and the Future
by Rebecca Solnit

Remember that twenty thousand polar bears are on your side. Unfortunately this is not an army of trained bears who will chase down the coal burners to, well, talk with them; they won’t even blockade coal mines or Chevron; that’s your job. But you are on the side of the bears, and of the marmots, the glaciers, the creatures who benefit from those glaciers, human and otherwise. Maybe a hundred million Pacific salmon are with you, the salmon that where I live hardly returned last winter to the streams where they are born, spawn and die, because the warming ocean produces less of their food. You are on the side of butterflies, coastlines, farmers, and the tropics. You are in the majority on this issue because of the tens of billions yet unborn who could live decent lives over the next several centuries if we get radical in this one. It will take radical measures to preserve the world as we know it; but at this moment in time you’re also a conservative, conserving the continuity of all things, by setting us on the path to getting carbon back to 350 parts per million in the atmosphere.

What needs to be most radical is your imagination. Scientists have described the inferno this world could become with runaway carbon levels. Will we let it happen because we could not imagine these glaciers melting, these droughts and floods and heat waves, these hurricanes tearing up these coastal cities, these seas dying, these croplands failing, these famines taking away millions? It’s happening now. Believe the scientists; believe what you do matters; believe that the time to act is now. The carbon corporations and their purchased politicians want to shut down your imagination, want you to believe that nothing crucial hangs in the balance, or they offer tiny gestures of mock compliance. Yeah, I will take the bus. And I'll fight the power. Everything will be different, but we don’t yet know how, because we are making that decision now, with imagination or without.

The Trail
by Barry Lopez

On a winter afternoon, along a trail in the Sierra Madre in the state of Mensajero, beneath an immense rampart of rising cumulonimbus, a deeply imperfect man bent over to collect a small piece of black glass. He recognized its kind: obsidian, a thick sliver of it. When the molten interior of the Earth is thrown into the frigid sky and it cools quickly it becomes a stone like this. People say of its edges that no knife is sharper, and of its color that it is transparent but bottomless, like the sea’s, so it cannot be rendered on paper or canvas.

The man turned the spalled flake over in the palm of one hand with the fingers of the other. He tested the edge with his thumb and held it up to the sun. He knew of no volcanoes in these mountains, but the trail was many centuries old, and people had carried red coral, abalone shells, and turquoise up and down it for generations. Someone dropped this, he thought, in the time when his grandfather was alive, or in the year of his own birth, or a pilgrim might have dropped it, only days ago.

It glittered in his palm, like sunlight in ice, and he wondered, as the heaving clouds encroached on the sun and the shard of glass darkened, what his obligations were. Should he give it back to the trail or pocket it for the single daughter he was traveling to see? In another age he would not have hesitated to take it to the girl. Now he felt he must put it back, even if later someone else might take it. He believed he had come upon a time in his life when everything, even the things of God, needed protection. When he met his daughter, he would tell her he had found a black tear in the dust of the narrow path and understood he must leave it be. And she would ask whose tear it was, and he would have to use his imagination in the way his people had once done.

POEM FOR THE GRANDCHILDREN OF THREE FIVE O
by Ariel Dorfman 

Oh dear Oh dear Oh dear
What should I do?
The polar bears are dying out.
Oh dear Oh dear
The children cannot breathe.
What should I do?
The elephants have nowhere
to flee.
The elephants Oh dear it’s true.
What should I
can I
must I do?
Oh dear Oh
Three Five O
Oh dear that scares me scares me so
Oh dear we won’t survive
Three Five O up in the sky
and no more birth
and it’s good-bye.
The seventh extinction is on its way.
Can the eighth extinction be far behind?
Oh dear
It’s much too big for little me
Not a tree not a tree
not even a shade of green.
Oh dear oh dear.
The cities all
vanished
wiped out.
The drought the plague the black dark
death.
Not even a bird
for our last breath.
And there’s nothing
nothing
nothing
I can do.
Much too big for you for him for her for me.
We’re melting the sea.
Oh dear
Oh.
Oh if I could only trust
the hand that is close
the hand that is here
Oh if I could count all over again
but not with dread.
Maybe one plus one makes more than two
maybe three can be three million strong
in fact
maybe five means five billion tall
ready to act
to make that O the sign of birth
and not the mark
of nightmares long
and lonely bread.
Three Five O
Dot.Org
Three Five O
organizers bold
bells that toll
climbers on the mountain
divers under the reef
we’ll come together
we’ll come together
in every corner of the earth
we have very little time
but we have each other
we have very little time
but I have little you
and you have little me
and time enough for us
to act and be free
as long as we have each other
one hand in my hand
there can only be birth
my dear oh my dear
there’s just love enough and time
now and here
now and here
to act and then nothing
nothing
nothing
to fear

POEMA PARA LOS NIETOS Y NIETAS DE TRES CINCO CERO
por Ariel Dorfman

 

¿Qué se le puede hacer?
Ay qué dolor ay qué dolor
ay qué dolor y qué pena
el ártico se derrite y el oso polar se muere
ay qué temor ay qué dolor
los pequeños no respiran
¿qué puedo voy a debo hacer?
ay qué miedo ay qué pena
TresCincoCero
en la tierra y en el cielo
ay qué pena ay qué miedo
un mundo sin nacimientos
un mundo que se cancela
ay qué terror
siendo tan grande el problema
y yo que soy tan pequeño
ni un árbol ni un arbolito
ni una sombra verdeoscura
ay qué pena ay qué condena

las ciudades se extinguen
la plaga la sequía la muerte
larga lenta y dura
ni un pájaro para despedir
nuestro último respiro
y no hay nada
nada
nada
nada que se pueda hacer
que pueda que yo pueda hacer
con un problema tan grande
porque soy tan pequeñuelo
ay qué dolor ay qué miedo
ay si pudiese ay si pudiera
confiar en una mano cercana
una mano que me sane
ay si pudiera hacer otra cuenta
sumar sin pavor y sin recelo
tal vez uno más uno reúne más que dos
tal vez tres son trescientos millones
tal vez cinco son cinco billones
de brazos que se levantan voces que cantan
tres y cinco y cero una huella
de algo que nace y no algo que muere
y somos más que un pan solitario
más que un día siempre de duelo
TresCincoCero
Punto Org
Trescientos Cincuenta
organizadores que se levantan
campanas que cantan
escaladores de montaña
fotógrafos de lo verde
nos vamos a juntar
nos vamos a juntar
en cada rincón y tigre de la tierra
no tenemos mucho tiempo
pero tú me tienes a mí tan pequeño
y yo te tengo a ti tan pequeñuela
no tenemos mucho tiempo
es cierto
aunque tiempo suficiente
para actuar y entonar
si tenemos tú y yo
una mano en nuestra mano
sólo podremos nacer
ay qué amor y no habrá pena
sino tiempo y ganas
acá y ahora
ahora y acá
y entonces no habrá
nada
nada
nada
que temer.

Optimism
by Jane Hirshfield 

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.
 
for Project 350, in strong hope