We, like the trees, can reach our full growth,Ĭan be room for other breeds and kinds and lives.Īnd after the end the voice still reaches us Now the elms go the way of the chestnut trees. Wild in the weeds, the breeze scatters the seeds,Īnd it lifts the wings of the pine processionary moth,Īnd bears the green glint of the emerald borer, That, sometimes, it’s a fine thing just to die, were heeded.Īnd the trees are leafless and black against the skyĪnd the bats in fatal whiteface sleep and rotĪnd the jellyfish drift and pulse through the warming watersĪnd everything changes.
No chemical suggestions that they were big enough She was killed by her breasts, by tumours in them:Ī clump of cells that would not listen to orders to disband Or to succeed, the aching need that drove our thoughts Remembering, as if it happened to someone else, The wisdom of the tribe, but we have stumbled,įallen face-first into our new uncomfortable roles. A fewīecome old: we went over time’s waterfall and lived, Like the sapling that buckles the sidewalkĪnd grows until it has reached its heightĪll of us begin in darkness.
Into the sun that shone through the tight-curled buds, They landed as one and watched me sleepily. The spring is signaled by birdsongĬoyotes screech and yammer in the moonlightĪnd the first flowers open. (Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)Ĭrowning the 2018 edition of The Universe in Verse, dedicated to Carson and her far-reaching legacy, was an original poem by Neil Gaiman, composed for the occasion to celebrate this visionary of uncommon courage and persistence - the rare gift of one genius honoring another, delivered by a third: Reading the poem was Amanda Palmer, herself an artist of radical courage and an ardent champion of poetry. How Rachel Carson signed her letters to her loved ones. This stunning notion that a long-dead poet can inspire a scientist to transform an entire society inspired the inception of The Universe in Verse - the annual celebration of science through poetry, which I host each spring at Brooklyn’s wondrous nonprofit cultural institute Pioneer Works and which in turn inspired my book Figuring, where Carson is a central figure and the interleaving of art, science, love, and cultural change a central theme. Rachel Carson (Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University) “Knowing what I do, there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent,” marine biologist and poet laureate of science Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) wrote to her beloved, quoting the line as she was readying to speak inconvenient truth to power - at great personal cost - in catalyzing the modern environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring. Half a century later, these words would come to embolden one of the most revolutionary voices humanity has produced - a scientist who changed culture by writing like a poet. “To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men,” the poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox wrote in her piercing and prescient 1914 anthem against silence.
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