Having grown up in the shadow of the Bomb and having provided supportive care to post-Cold War generations of children and their parents (both in crisis), I have seen a lot of distrust and instability in people–individually and in communities. I have seen how the shadow of impending doom can rewrite a way that people live.
This distrust and instability is not a personal issue. It is a sign and symptom of having lived in a time when the imagination can harbor not simply notions of tribal decay and destruction, but the decay and destruction of all tribes, in all places, and throughout all future time. We can wipe out everything that exists within the realm of our planet–in an instant. This changes who people are. This changes how people grow and develop.
The current earth crisis is large. It looms overhead and in our homes. It is more visible and prevalent than the crisis of the Bomb. Everything we pick up and discard is a reminder that we have a problem. In many ways this crisis is more severe than the Bomb. In this crisis everyone has a button they can push to bring destruction. We have more madmen to worry about. Everyone. Everyone has an impact on global ecologic and climate issues.
Here are poets’ songs on the beauty of the earth, lest we forget.
Mengenai Pengarang
Glinda Johnson-Medland is a published writer and poet who grew up in Connecticut and now resides outside Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and has spent the majority of her career life as a social worker and therapist. She is currently the Executive Director of word hive: a space for poets; a new nonprofit committed to bringing poetry to local communities in the form of workshops, poetry readings and collaboration with other artists. She is currently working on grants and other supports for word hive. She has published poems and articles in a variety of journals beginning in 1985. She has also had her poems published in a book that both Tom and she collected and coedited, published by Wipf and Stock Publishers of Oregon. That volume came out in 2013. It is entitled For the Beauty of The Earth: Poems from the Child-Heart About the Planet, and features both Glinda and Tom’s poetry while spotlighting 23 local poets from the Pocono Mountains of PA.