Causes to Celebrate: Poetry Coaltion and Inernational Women's Day

I am so excited to start off this week by highlighting not only environmental projects, but also to be celebrating International Women's Day.  And today I get to highlight a woman whose poem has inspired this year's Poetry Coalition AND their mission to explore the theme of Poetry and Environmental Justice.  This is a trifecta for me, as it includes three things that really embody this week's theme but also includes one of my true loves: poetry.

The poem is called "Map" and was written by Linda Hogan, an acclaimed poet and teacher.  She is also a member of the Chickasaw Nation, a Native American Indian tribe, and she's written several essays, books, and even wrote the script for a PBS documentary on American Indian religious freedom titled Everything Has a Spirit.  I'd definitely recommend checking out her Biography page on her website if you're interested in learning more about her.  On this International Women's Day I feel she is the prefect embodiment of what it means to be a woman here in America.  She is part of our cultural past, but also a thriving member of that cultural present.  She is striving to create a space for her people in this world while sharing with us the spirit of what it means to be a woman through her own perceptions and also through Chickasaw traditions.  It is a powerful legacy that lends a greater meaning to womanhood in the world, and I find myself bolstered by her love and her passion for her native culture and traditions that are a part of this nation's own history--something I am grateful she is striving to preserve for future generations.

Her poem, Map, was chosen as the inspiration for this year's Poetry Coalition theme of Poetry and Environmental Justice.

Map
by: Linda Hogan

This is the world
so vast and lonely
without end, with mountains
named for men
who brought hunger
from other lands,
and fear
of the thick, dark forest of trees
that held each other up,
knowing fire dreamed of swallowing them
and spoke an older tongue,
and the tongue of the nation of wolves
was the wind around them.
Even ice was not silent.
It cried its broken self
back to warmth.
But they called it
ice, wolf, forest of sticks,
as if words would make it something
they could hold in gloved hands,
open, plot a way
and follow.

This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.
This is what I know from science:
that a grain of dust dwells at the center
of every flake of snow,
that ice can have its way with land,
that wolves live inside a circle
of their own beginning.
This is what I know from blood:
the first language is not our own.

There are names each thing has for itself,
and beneath us the other order already moves.
It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.

Linda Hogan from her Biography page

I really, really love that last stanza that brings all the thoughts before it into focus:

There are names each thing has for itself,
and beneath us the other order already moves.
It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.

For me those words are a realization that this world, which we have named, has existed long before us and will likely go on long after humanity is no longer here--that even though we've given names to things, that doesn't mean that we truly understand them or control them. And that, perhaps because of what we are doing, the world that was here before us is making changes that could mean the end of our time here on this planet.  We are, relatively speaking, very young in this universe's reckoning of time, and there is so much more that we don't know and don't understand, and perhaps it is time to remember that.

That said, I love that the Poetry Coalition is looking toward the future with this year's theme.  It's an invitation to discuss what our future here on Earth could and should be.  It's an invitation to consider what we've done and been doing, and consider better ways of being that doesn't destroy or devastate the world around us.  Because if we don't, the world:

It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.

We can either be a part of that dream, and burn with the passion of sharing our existence on this planet, or we can wake up to find ourselves being burnt by the choices we have made. 

And that is why I find the Poetry Coalition is a cause worth celebrating on this International Women's Day and during this week's theme of the environment.