Unfolding Hope

after Jane Hirshfield

Quiet Estuary

Prairie at dawn—

rainforest upside-down,

roots drinking sky,

slowing rain,

breathing carbon,

teeming with life—

Most eyes pass without seeing.


Once,

the sandhill cranes

filled this silence with voice—

gregarious and untamed,

rattling up

from something ancient.


Emptied.


Silenced by relentless hands,

by thoughtless want,

their wings clipped.


Early 1900s—

The prairie held her breath,

clinging to the last.

Life's Stubborn March



The land found her advocates.

Hunters loving what they hunted,

ranchers listening as the calls grew thin,

scientists counting what remained—24.

Said:

Enough!


The Migratory Bird Treaty Act

drew a line—

not a wall—a promise.


Wetlands were protected,

refuges established,

and slowly,

stubbornly,

life reclaimed its course.


That call— prehistoric,

rattling up from the Pleistocene—

is what Aldo Leopold heard

at dawn

in the marsh

and could not

unhear.


The orchestra of evolution, he understood,

does not perform for us—

we are

     her

          instrument.

Courtship Dance


To see

is to notice the fragile wings,

their grace caught in morning light;

to know

is to keep returning.

When we hear that call

we hear not the past—

we hear the future.

Watch them dance—

leaping,

     bowing,

          choosing.

Tell me we are not them.
 

These are not small victories.

They are proof passed forward.

Against the forgetting.


What was nearly lost

is held again.

Knowledge Is The Bridge


From blindness

     to sight.

From sight

     to love.

And love, in turn—

Ranchers, hunters,

farmers,

you —

learning to listen

from roots to skies,

declaring wetlands sacred.


The Anthropocene

is not yet written.

Its last word

is the one we choose.

The cranes are calling.

Cindee Travis Klement