355e must go back and find a trail on the
ground,” says William Stafford in “Watching the Jet Planes Dive.” Blazing
that trail toward environmental sanity is the English peasant John Clare, least
known of the Romantics, who told his children, “I usd to drop down under a
bush & scribble the fresh thoughts on the crown of my hat as I found nature
then.” Our own children will depend on that alertness, that freshness.
It ’s said that kids today suffer from “nature-deficit disorder,” exploring the
Web not the woods. But listen to a Seattle preschool’s Sunlight Room, writing
to the city council: “We hate pollution. Stop it! You should ride bikes, or walk,
or go on roller skates or rollerblades. You should do recycling.... Send this to
another people, and then they read it, and then they give it to another person,
and they give it around to the whole wide city, and Africa. Pass it until it comes
in the whole wide world.” (plate 22)
Bringing news to the world has been a task of poets. Bob Hass, poet laureate
in 1995, set out bringing poetry close to the American grain. A kind of Johnny
Appleseed, he alerted folks across the country, schoolchildren as well as fraternal
groups, to our indispensable environment, and founded the River of Words
project, inviting children to write poems on the watershed they dwell in. El’Jay
Johnson, age eight, from River Terrace Elementary School in Maryland, whose
teacher was Patricia Ann Goodnight, won the Watershed Prize for his poem on
“Just imagine”
Can Poetry Save the Earth?
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