Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

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Introduction

Care in Such a World

My words are tied in one

With the great mountains

With the great rocks

With the great trees

In one with my body

And my heart

round 1900 a tribal shaman chanted that
prayer, in the Yokuts tongue:

nim yèt·au t·ikexo texal

maiayiu lomto...

An anthropologist transcribed and translated it. With their oral culture the
Yokuts people had dwelt in California’s San Joaquin Valley since prehistory,
numbering in the tens of thousands. Now few if any speakers remain, but there
are ways to call on the faith breathing life into that prayer.
“My words are tied in one / With the great mountains.” Once upon many
times and places, the bonding of words with nature was a given. “Let us make
earth, Let us make earth,” Apache myth has a creator singing. A Hopi sun god
and spider woman sing each tribe to life. Australian aboriginals tell of totemic
beings who wandered the continent “singing out the name of everything that
crossed their path—birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes—and so singing
the world into existence.”
Another Creation story, in the Hebrew Bible, begins ,%86',B’reysheet:
“In the beginning” the world was spoken, named into being. “God said, Let
there be light, and there was light... God called the dry land Earth, and the
gathering of the waters God called Seas.” The “great whales” and other crea-
tures of earth, sea, and air were brought forth first. Then came the moment for

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