Earth Day Poetry Contest – April 2022
April is National Poetry Month, and we celebrate Earth Day on April 22! In honor of both, GBA is launching an Earth Day Poetry Contest in the spirit of our Inspire Speakers Series. Submit your poems (any kind – sonnets, haiku, free verse – whatever!) to lesliem@gbapgh.org. GBA will be sharing poems that are submitted, and a randomly selected winner from all submissions will receive a new hardcopy of Nature Poems for Every Day of the Year.
Need some inspiration for your entry to the contest? Check out these nature-inspired poems.
At the Spring Dawn
I watched the dawn come,
Watched the spring dawn come.
And the red sun shouldered his way up
Through the grey, through the blue,
Through the lilac mists.
The quiet of it! The goodness of it!
And one bird awoke, sang, whirred
A blur of moving black against the sun,
Sang again—afar off.
And I stretched my arms to the redness of the sun,
Stretched to my finger tips,
And I laughed.
Ah! It is good to be alive, good to love,
At the dawn,
At the spring dawn.
When White Hawks Come
I dreamt the spirit of the codfish:
in rafters of the mind;
fly out into the winter’s
blue night;
mirth off alder tendrils sashay;
while I set up
my winter tent;
four panels long—beams suspend
I sit & pull blubber strips aged in a poke bag;
I’m shadowing the sun as a new moon icicle
time melts when white hawks come.
There Will Come Soft Rains
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Our Land
We should have a land of sun,
Of gorgeous sun,
And a land of fragrant water
Where the twilight is a soft bandanna handkerchief
Of rose and gold,
And not this land
Where life is cold.
We should have a land of trees,
Of tall thick trees,
Bowed down with chattering parrots
Brilliant as the day,
And not this land where birds are gray.
Ah, we should have a land of joy,
Of love and joy and wine and song,
And not this land where joy is wrong.
Poem 133: The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed,
how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver