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Phyllis Shafer, “Magical Moment at Fallen Leaf Lake”, gouache on paper, 17.5 x 22.5 inches. More of Phyllis’ work here.
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Nourishment
Origin Story
by Leah Naomi Green
“What is dying is the willingness to be in denial.”
—angel Kyodo williams
The heron flew away
and I wanted to tell someone
how long it stayed,
how close I got,
how much I missed it
even as it stood
to watch me,
large-eyed animal
that I am, terrible
at believing what I can’t see.
You see fire in the home
where we live: the world
in cardiac arrest.
A heart attack
is not the onset I want to say
to someone, it’s the flare.
It illuminates what’s already here:
the forests
illuminated, the earth
lit as an origin story.
Here you are,
I say instead,
aloud, surprised
at how close
I’ve been holding you
in the dark.
Flame yields
no new landscape.
It bares the contours
like a map
so we can see
where we’ve been all along,
can see one another
as we walk, and say,
for once, nothing
at the fire’s steady flight,
like a heron
lifting in loud beats,
our silent mouths open
as if to give it a tunnel.
Leah Naomi Green is the author of The More Extravagant Feast (Graywolf Press, 2020), selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of The Academy of American Poets. Green is recipient of the 2021 Lucille Clifton Award. She teaches environmental studies and English at Washington and Lee University and lives in an ecological community in the mountains of Virginia where she and her family homestead and grow food.
“Origin Story” was the second-place winner in the 2021 Academy of American Poets Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize.
Entry for this year’s Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize is open now through November 15, 2022. You can submit your poem here (and let us know if you do — we always love hearing poetry from this newsletter community!).
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Project updates
- ✏️ Are you an educator teaching climate this year (or do you know someone who is)?
We have a suite of free, open resources for educators in any subject, who are looking to bring climate truth, courage, and just solutions into the classroom. Flexible enough for a single lesson or a full course.
Explore our educator resources →
- 🎧 A podcast episode exploring climate emotions
A Matter of Degrees (co-hosted by our own Katharine Wilkinson) just dropped a new episode, all about climate feelings. What is climate change doing to our hearts, minds and bodies? How can we cope? Hear from three experts: Dr. Kritee Kanko, Selin Nurgün, and Dr. Britt Wray.
Listen to “How to cope with all the climate feels” →
- 🧪 Experiments in new realms for impact
Over the past four months, we’ve been experimenting with paid advertising as a way to expand the reach of our small-group organizing model, All We Can Save Circles. Our initial findings? Surprisingly, one of the most effective places we’ve found Circle leaders has been through Pinterest.
More to come about learnings from this work in future newsletters. And if you found our work via a Pinterest post, welcome!
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