Poetry Corner: Protecting Our Environment

POETRY CORNER

– 07/19/17

Hosted by Kathabela Wilson

This week we welcome a wonderful visiting tanka poet to Pasadena from Japan, Mariko Kitakubo, who shares our hopes and dreams for the future of a flourishing earth, protected by those who love her. Our corner has often presented Japanese form poetry, haiku and tanka by international poets.

Michele L. Harvey, whose beautiful verse here so embodies a strong protective urge and expression of nature says: “In Japanese poetry forms nature is part and parcel of the human experience and therefore central to artistic expression. With the health of our planet on shaky ground, the poet becomes an instrument of change and a a voice for the voiceless.​”​ You’ll also find here the fine work of Jonathan Vos Post who champions environmental science, enlightening and encouraging the natural habitat he loves.

~ Kathabela

Crossing painting, 70 x 60, by Michele L. Harvey.

Michele L. Harvey

if all the things
I’ve done in my life
come to nothing…
oh, but the trees I’ve planted
and the wildflowers of my fields

the same boat
we’re all in together
the seas rise
as lawmakers argue
over scientific fact

The environment is a core interest of Michele L. Harvey. Much like bodily health, nothing good happens without a healthy planet. As a poet-painter steeped in the ways of nature and as an ordinary being who depends on the air, water, soil and life on the planet, Michele L. Harvey often includes the environment in her poetry.To not do so would be neglecting the essential purpose of her art.She lives ​winters​ in New York City and​ summers​ in Hamilton, NY.

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Arch painting, 50 x 72, by Michele L. Harvey.

Mariko Kitakubo

kids are
collecting mushrooms
but do they contain
cesium and strontium
mushroom mushroom

we don’t learn
from the old days
a picnicker says
under the cloudless sky
big beautiful mushrooms

Mariko Kitakubo lives in Tokyo, Japan and is presently visiting and performing tanka at her favorite city, Pasadena, CA. She “spreads the seeds of tanka” with the music of her Japanese language performances, and translates to English. Like all of us in the USA. we wonder what is contained in the growing things around us and what we eat. She belongs to an ecology writing group of the Japan PEN Club in Japan. She performs and meets with with ‘Poets on Site’ and at special reading performances during her visits.

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Voyage painting, 50 X 36, by Michele L. Harvey.

Jonathan Vos Post

Iceberg to Titanic:
Be the Hell Aware
Larsen-C ice-shelf loosens — no panic —
iceberg the size of Delaware

Jonathan Vos Post says: “I live in my quarter acre of orange trees, olive trees, and Mister Lincoln Roses in the Altadena Foothills of the fast-eroding San Gabriel Mountains.” He attends and reads his work at our ‘Poets on Site’ events each Thursday at Storrier Stearns Garden in Pasadena, CA. Visitors are welcome to join us in the garden on this public day, to be inspired by our poetry and enjoy the world flutes of Rick Wilson, and often, the melodica, mandola and fiddle of Jean Sudbury.

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♣ We welcome and encourage your response especially in the form of short poems. You may reply by leaving a comment below.