after the show
on global warming
I shiver
sitting on the warm step
beneath a late sinking summer sky

I have always been an ecologically-minded person; and I raised my children to be the same; my son grew up to make a career out of it. But on this lazy August Sunday afternoon, after watching a program on the Discovery Channel about global warming, with my son, I felt a wave of shame come over me; somewhere along the way, even with all my attention and admiration for the natural world, and the poems it produces, I've become somewhat of a slacker. After the show, I wanted to repent and trade in my SUV in for an economical hybrid, buy organic foods, change all the lightbulbs in my house to energy savers, unplug all my unused appliances and whatever else I could to decrease my CO2 output!

So I felt ashamed, anxious and overwhelmed, but as I sat on the step, watching that big old sun I'd been taking for granted fall from that big old waning summer sky, I told myself, its never too late. Its not too late, and no effort is too small. Today, corny as it sounds, a TV show reminded me of how precious the world I write about everyday really is. And because of that, I made a new commitment to make some changes, however small, in the way I live my everyday life.

I went back into the house and turned off all the ceiling fans in all the rooms except the one I was in. Tomorrow I'm off to the store in my SUV to buy energy saving lightbulbs. On second thought, maybe I'll bike. I could use the exercise.

sea stones
line my back porch railing
salmon ivory and slate
how I yearn now return
to where I found them

Seems appropriate that my first post should be a poem about 'sea stones', hence the name of this blog, and also fitting that I should retrieve one of the first tanka poems I ever wrote (with a bit of revision of course).

I like this poem because it speaks to the cyclical theme so often found in tanka, in nature and in the human experience. The older I get, the more I find myself returning to the simple things; also the more I question our taking things away from their natural places. This poem speaks to both, returning the stones to their home and also the speaker returning to the place where she found the stones, a place of beauty that can never really be kept or emulated by the kept objects. Just the same, we are all collectors and even aware of beauty's mutability, by keeping the stones we hope to be reminded of the beauty we witnessed first hand. And the cycle repeats.