Love Letters to Poetry | "the earth is a living thing"

My love letter to poetry is also a love letter to the earth.

the earth is a living thing
by Lucille Clifton

is a black shambling bear
ruffling its wild back and tossing
mountains into the sea

is a black hawk circling
the burying ground circling the bones
picked clean and discarded

is a fish black blind in the belly of water
is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal

is a black and living thing
is a favorite child
of the universe
feel her rolling her hand
in its kinky hair
feel her brushing it clean

Last summer, I had the unforgettable experience of visiting Iceland. Happily, I discovered it is not an island covered in ice. Instead, Iceland is a country that easily enchants, with its lava fields that look like moonscapes, turquoise volcano lakes, steaming geothermal pools and geysers, and earth so hot that bread can be baked in it. It is a land where we felt the earth breath, and could see the continents drift apart. Wherever we looked, we saw the evidence of the earth as a living thing.

I chose Lucille Clifton’s poem to honor Earth Day on April 22, 2023. Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. It’s celebrated each year around the world by more than one billion people. I like to think of it as a Valentine’s Day for the earth.

Lucille Clifton once said, “everything is connected.” How right she was. Her house is now a resource connecting community through creative arts. Her poem serves as the title of the first illustrated anthology of poetry of nature and Black belonging, to be published by Chronicle Books. The brilliant artist Leila Fanner will be our illustrator. The idea came to me after learning more about Christian Cooper, a Black man birdwatching in Central Park threatened with a call to police, in a viral moment with more than 40 million views. Cooper’s new memoir is a love letter to the natural world, and about the power of love over fear.

Some activities

1. This is a well-known scientific hypothesis about how the earth is “one, great living organism.” How can this perspective change the way we see and treat the earth?

2. What do you think of the striking images in the poem, like the earth with kinky hair? Take a look at this class discussion as a start.

3. According to the United Nations, half of the world’s children live in high-risk areas facing a deadly threat from climate and environmental shocks. Write a poem from the perspective of one of these children.

4. Write a poem from the point of view of the earth during an extreme weather event, such as a hurricane, a flood, or a tornado.

5. What do you think of rituals and ceremonies that mourn the loss of the natural world, such as the death of glaciers? Write a poem about mourning a part of nature that feels most important to you.

6. Climate doomerism is going viral. Write a poem inspired by Sage Lenier, whose nonprofit is fighting climate despair with collective action.

7. Different cultures have described the earth’s origins through myth. Some examples are shared on Windows to the Universe, from the National Earth Science Teachers Association. Choose one myth, and use it as the starting line of a poem.

Whenever we step outside—and take in the air we mostly take for granted—it’s the perfect time to consider how everything is connected, and what it truly means to see the earth, our special Valentine, as a living thing.

Lucille Clifton - 1936-2010

Remembering Lucille Clifton