Faith

State of the Planet

by Robert Hass

Line 1

October on the planet at the century’s end.
Rain lashing the windshield. Through blurred glass
Gusts of a Pacific storm rocking a huge, shank-needled
Himalayan cedar. Under it a Japanese plum
Throws off a vertical cascade of leaves the color
Of skinned copper, if copper could be skinned.
And under it, her gait as elegant and supple
As the young of any of earth’s species, a schoolgirl
Negotiates a crosswalk in the wind, her hair flying.
The red satchel on her quite straight back darkening
Splotch by smoky crimson splotch as the rain pelts it.
One of the six billion of her hungry and curious kind.
Inside the backpack, dog-eared, full of illustrations,
A book with a title like Getting to Know Your Planet.

The book will tell her that the earth this month
Has yawed a little distance from the sun,
And that the air, cooling, has begun to move,
As sensitive to temperature as skin is
To a lover’s touch. It will also tell her that the air –
It’s likely to say “the troposphere” has trapped
Emissions from millions of cars, idling like mine
As she crosses, and is making a greenhouse
Of the atmosphere. The book will say that climate
Is complicated, that we may be doing this,
And if we are, it may explain that this
Was something we’ve done quite accidentally,
Which she can understand, not having meant
That morning to have spilled the milk. She’s
One of those who’s only hungry metaphorically

Line 7

The people who live in Tena, on the Napo River,
Say that the black, viscid stuff the pools in the selva
Is the blood of the rainbow boa curled in the earth’s core.
The great trees in that forest house ten thousands of kinds
Of beetle, reptiles no human eyes has ever seen changing
Color on the hot, green, hardly changing leaves
Whenever a faint breeze stirs them. In the understory
Bromeliads and orchids whose flecked petals and womb-
Or mouth-like flowers are the shapes of desire
In human dreams. And butterflies, larger than her palm
Held up to catch a ball or ward off fear. Along the river
Wide-leaved banyans where flocks of raucous parrots,
Fruit-eaters and seed-eaters, rise in startled flares
Of red and yellow and bright green. It will seem to be poetry
Forgetting its promise of sobriety to say the rosy shinings
In the thick brown current are small dolphins rising
To the surface where gouts of the oil that burns inside
The engine of the car I’m driving oozes from the banks.


I suggest anyone who loves poetry, whether they prefer
the nature genre or not, should read this poem. The depictions
and the places that Robert takes you are phenomenal.

My favorite line of the poem that actually sparked
the topic of my blog tonight goes as follows:

Line 10

What is go be done with our species? Because
We know we're going to die, to be submitted
To that tingling dance of atoms once again,
It's easy for us to feel that our lives are a dream-
As this is, in away, a dream: the flailing rain,
The birds the soaked red backpack of the child,
Her tendrils of wet hair, the windshield wipers,
This voice trying to to speak across centuries
Between us, even the long story of earth,
Boreal forests, mangrove swamps, Tiberian wheatfields
In the summer heat on hillsides south of Rome - all of it A dream, and we alive somewhere, somehow outside it, Watching.....

In thinking about this poem and the imagery he portrays I
thought about a lot of things. I considered how blessed I was to be
raised in the country. I grew up understanding and enjoying nature.
This poem meant so much to me being as I would love to go all the
places discussed int he poem and see them for my own eyes. Then I
was brought to my next thought. Robert is talking about all of these
places as if they were a dream, and in a small way he is right.
How do we really know these places exist? (Other than the fact we now
have sofisticated technology) If we lay technology aside, many of us
never actually seen these places with or own eyes, therefore how do
we know they really exist? To us they are like a dream because we
have essentially never actually captured their image in real life.
This makes the poem seem more like experiencing a dream.
Sure technology says thee places are there, but have you seen them?
Have I? This idea makes the poem seem more enjoyable for me.
The fact that it takes me to a place I have never been, but also I do not
know COMPLETELY concrete that is exists. This also
sparked a new thought. I have faith. Being a christian, I have faith
in God. He is something I have not concretely seen, but that makes
him all more real. "Blessed are those who believe and have not seen,"
is what Jesus said to Thomas.

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for,
the evidence of things not seen. "

I think this is completely relevant to poetry
analyzing and experiencing. I think that poetry requires a certain
amount of faith, in this sense. We can never really know concretely
what a poet/poem is trying to say. In that way we dream an idea and
then we formulate a belief. We set our faith towards the belief that
our assumption about the poem is correct. Although, fortunately
for us poetry is open. We can take anything from it we choose.