I hope this finds you doing the damn thing, solarpunks. While we’re at it, why not let’s reflect beauty throughout. Here then are some poems on climate justice.
Know another stunner? Will gladly keep this updated with more we find, as well as pull-out any lines that stand-out to you.
Quoted lines below are only brief segments— click-through the Poet Name, Poet Title headlines to read the poems in-full.
Joy Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings
6. AND, USE WHAT YOU LEARN TO RESOLVE YOUR OWN CONFLICTS AND TO MEDIATE OTHERS' CONFLICTS:
When we made it back home, back over those curved roads
that wind through the city of peace, we stopped at the
doorway of dusk as it opened to our homelands.
We gave thanks for the story, for all parts of the story
because it was by the light of those challenges we knew
ourselves—
We asked for forgiveness.
We laid down our burdens next to each other.
KB Brookins, Good Grief
I haven’t recovered from seeing things that too-closely resemble holes in a graveyard.
I haven’t forgotten the project is due in 2 weeks.
My therapist says take it easy as if capitalism is listening. As if the body will ever forget what it is given.
I am Black which is history, personified.
I used to listen to Pilot Jones fondly. With all this frostbite on my fingers, I’m not sure if I can type.
I cannot finish another sentence on unity.
What is unified about ERCOT letting us freeze? Knowing how to fix the problem & not doing it; how does that form a Kumbaya circle?
If I made art about every pain I’ve felt unjustly, I would be swimming in accolades for great American books.
I would take back every word I’ve written if it ended this.
America is the worst group project.
I’m writing a great American poem about suffering.
Natalie Diaz, Manhattan is a Lenape Word
What is loneliness if not unimaginable
light and measured in lumens—
an electric bill which must be paid,
a taxi cab floating across three lanes
with its lamp lit, gold in wanting.
At 2 a.m. everyone in New York City
is empty and asking for someone.Again, the siren’s same wide note:
Help me. Meaning, I have a gift
and it is my body, made two-handed
of gods and bronze.
Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
There was the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way through sacred water, and the apocalypse of the dogs. Before which was the apocalypse of the dogs and the hoses. Before which, the apocalypse of dogs and slave catchers whose faces glowed by lantern light. Before the apocalypse, the apocalypse of bees. The apocalypse of buses. Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in the textbook’s selective silences. There was the apocalypse of the settlement
Suzi F. Garcia, A Modified Villanelle for My Childhood
Mi familia wanted to assimilate, nothing radical,
Each month was a struggle to pay our rent
With food stamps, so dust collects on the magical.Each month it got a little less civil
Isolation is a learned defense
When all you wanna do is write lyrical.None of us escaped being a criminal
Of the state, institutionalized when
They found out all we had was magical.
Joseph Hope, Good Water
Sweetness; butterfly season; flying flowers. A new world inside
the old world. I want to swim
with whales and baby sharks. I want to dwell
In paradise where carbon doesn’t decay and ice doesn’t melt.
Langston Hughes, An Earth Song
And I've been waiting long for a spring song.
Strong as the shoots of a new plant
Strong as the bursting of new buds
Strong as the coming of the first child from its mother's womb.
Ladan Osman, Sun to Void
All blooms, all fruits.
At first, I was a lamp
craned above a clovered garden.
The roots, they suckled the dirt,
and lashed it, and crawled for eons.
Then they were standing upright
all over the earth.
My gaze horizoned.
My origination fogged.
My eyes searched forever,
my gaze compassing.
Richard Blanco, Complaint of El Río Grande
I was meant for all things to meet:
the mirrored clouds and sun’s tingle,
birdsongs and the quiet moon, the wind
and its dust, the rush of mountain rain—
and us. Blood that runs in you is water
flowing in me, both life, the truth we
know we know: be one in one another.
Sharon Olds, Ode to Dirt
Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you,
I thought that you were only the background
for the leading characters—the plants
and animals and human animals.
It’s as if I had loved only the stars
and not the sky which gave them space
in which to shine.
John Pluecker, So Many
so many mechanics so many broken down cars so many lay in the sun so many wait so many trees blow in the early morning wind so many speed up and so many people go home so many people go to work so many undone so many bulldozers so many hoses spray water on wreckage so many shovelfuls of metal and lumber so many precious objects discard so many lost in the tumble so many feelings so many yellow and red so many silver and gold so many blue and green so many green things so many grass so many suns beat down so many heatstrokes so many city moves on so many layers so many accumulations so many things a street a street remember
Monifa Love, Abraham Lincoln Turns to Listen to the Lower Ninth
Pushing through the water
inside the body of Jesus
the Lord
the Wonderer,
we huddle indecently,
resisting the foul compression
that would shame us
into that which we are not
that would turn our salty bloodinto molasses
rum
cooking oil,
that would turn our bodies
into leather goods
and amusementthat would make us forget
we are water
inevitably returning to the river and the sky
always returning
baked by the sun to rising,
and falling as rain.
Atreyee Gupta, The Journey
Every light spirals
towards its black holeevery dream drowns
so another can flyand as I near
my event horizon
the nightingale
sings no solutionsonly a hymn in syncopation
wild with grief
and declination —embrace cracked night,
half-life decay
into minutiae of gamma rays,between self and other
lies no border
ad infinitum…
Nisha Atalie, Do/Do Not
I accept that my love is a
poisonous flower, routinely fatal.I calculate the force of
loving in each glittering death.All day on this land, in the
deep forest, the electric greens and
still-wet mud writhe with life.
“In short, there is no way—no way—to imagine the kind of best-case scenarios surrounding climate change that we need to imagine into being without also imagining greater racial equality and justice.” Min Hyoung Song, “Climate Lyricism”