Merwin in “ A Language for Nature: Preserving the Hawaiian Rainforest” If you say ‘this is too bad, but I've got other things to think about,’ nothing’s going to happen.” You should find it so upsetting that you can't put it down.’ That's the only way things are going to happen. Students sometimes say, when I talk about it, ‘I find this very upsetting.’ And I say, ‘You should. “What is happening to the rainforest what is happening to biodiversity how fast the species are going this is terrible. from “ Investing in Poetry: An Interview with the Team at Treehouse Investments” But we long for Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owens, poets who can interpret our experience and explain it to those who will come after.” Like most soldiers, we lean on the entire universe of language to buttress us-from songs to smutty limericks. “We are foot soldiers in the war against climate change, and we are losing. “ Earth Your Dancing Place” by May Swenson “ Drifting Flowers of the Sea” by Sadakichi Hartmann Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day… “ the earth is a living thing” by Lucille Clifton Stopped in cars, we are waiting to accelerate… “ Mother Earth: Her Whales” by Gary Snyder Toeing the metal marker drilled in granite… This morning this planet is covered by winds and blue… “ I Want to Save This Whale” by Lisa Olstein “ Notes on a Mass Stranding” by Kamilah Aisha Moon “ Why Whales Are Back in New York City” by Rajiv Mohabir River with a valley so shallow it is measured…

That streetlight looks like the slicked backbone… “ Third Rock from the Sun” by Dorianne Laux “ Talking About New Orleans” by Jayne Cortez “ Kid, this is the first rain” by Jeffrey Bean “ Endangered Species” by Dan Beachy-Quick “ Last Night We Saw South Pacific” by James Applewhite “ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier (after Wallace Stevens)” by Craig Santos Perez “ Some Effects of Global Warming in Lackawanna County” by Jay Parini Most likely, you will think we hated the elephant… “ Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now” by Matthew Olzmann “ Song for the Turtles in the Gulf” by Linda Hogan “ The Poem Grace Interrupted” by Mikko Harvey Some things on this earth are unspeakable… DungyĪsk me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you… “ I Don’t Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We've Done to the Earth” by Fatimah Asghar A good poem reminds us of everything we share and everything we put at risk.” -Treehouse Investments, in a Q&A about the Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize A good poem will string words together like pearls and connect us, shock us out of our usual tropes. A good poem reminds us of our shared humanity. We have failed, somehow, to humanize this issue. And yet we have been unable to effect change at the necessary scale. Its negative social and financial consequences are clear, dire, and exponential. “The science of climate change is unequivocal. Browse poems engaging with the climate crisis, including poems about climate change, global warming, nature, and the environment.

Poems about the beautiful weather