Showing posts with label earth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label earth. Show all posts

Friday, January 26, 2024

Earth: The Mad Planter

This Earth, this spinning, orbiting ball
of rock with a sizzling center--like
a weird truffle candy--seems
to want to cover itself in carbon-addicted
life: weeds, trees, vines, moss, lichen,
brush, and on and greening on. Well,
it is chilly in space, so why not grow a coat?

I love to see cracks in concrete 
become narrow weed gardens,
to see vacant city lots turn into
jungles, which people of course 
turn into dumps for paper, aluminum,
and bloody needles. And

think of the underground,
the massive, brute tangle of 
leg-sized roots under a conifer
forest, my God. Vast tendril
clusters under pastures. Can
a planet have a will? I think so:

The Earth will keep sneezing
seeds, rooting rhyzomes, 
making bulb-grenades, pulling
vines out of vines, calling 
its berserk plant-army into
peaceful, triumphant war. 

Hans Ostrom 2024

Thursday, March 30, 2023

Out of Our Way, Please

A small electric light behind me,
a merest proton echo of the sun--
and so my shadow leads me,
but I am in the way of where 
I ought to go, as I move down
a corridor at midnight, fretting. 

It's almost day now
and nearly when Earth spins
around to get out of its way,
and lets the Big Light bring
its rays to nourish everything
that grows and every mind that knows,
and every mind should want to know.

Oh, come now, all of us and everyone
with our tiny twisted prejudice, our petty
staggering away from proven ways to know,
our sad attachments to cold cadaverous
puppeteers: Let's at long last get
out of our own way. Let's not block
the light that lets us know that we
and every other human are essentially
the same on this our spinning planet. 
That we are "the people," and no other. 


hans ostrom

Thursday, March 26, 2020

From a Diary of the Plague Year (4)

The universe occurs
all over again always
now and then. The bustling
biological fuzz on Earth's
crust crackles. Humans
pursue strategies for hiding
from something they can't
see, a maddening minute
enemy. Other forms
of life--birds, fish--
stay busy with their
evolved tasks and necessary
ambitions. I pretend to draw
a box around it all
and call it Today.


hans ostrom 2020

Friday, September 15, 2017

Concerning Me and a Concept Called You

Like you I was in space today,
moving around on what some call
Earth.  The Chinese in Mandarin
call it tu, with a diacritic mark
over the u, a parenthesis lying
on its back, looking up at the sky.

Evolution means the weather
can seem calibrated perfectly
to me (and you) and me (and you)
to the weather.  A peace treaty
signed by molecules. Can be
revoked at any time.

After work, I returned
to the circumstance by which
regardless of how much humans
learn, certain fundamental
mysteries will not yield,
such as what's the all about?--
this moving around on a
matter-ball that spins and tilts
and orbits and has an indigestive core
of molten stuff.



hans ostrom