Tricycle | Awake in the World

Hello Earth. What can we say to you on a day like today—your day—when the glaciers are melting and the rivers are rising? That we're sorry? We know that you're sick. We know that we've taken advantage of you, that we're responsible for your dangerously high temperatures. Should we apologize to you on your big day? At a moment like this, would it be awkward if we said "Thank you"?On this Earth Day I'm thinking of something that Kurt Vonnegut wrote towards the end of his life. The crucified planet Earth, should it find a voice and a sense of irony, might now well say of our abuse of it, “Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do.” The irony would be that we know what we are doing. When the last living thing has died on account of us, how poetic it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here.” More »

In honor of World Water Day, here's a poem by Sam Hamill from the pages of Tricycle: What the Water Knows What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive. A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world. Still, the heart is a river pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed. It opens on a bay and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in, it carries the cry of the loon and the salts of the unutterably human. A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide upstream until he disappears into the nothing from which he came. Only the thought remains. Lacking the eagle’s cunning or the wisdom of the sparrow, where shall I turn, drowning in sorrow? Who will know what the trees know, the spidery patience of young maple or what the willows confess? More »