Poetry Collection

Yoginis and Yogis time for a meditation

on breath and the global carbon cycle.

Get seated into easy pose—sukhasana.

Sit down on your sitz bones as you

straighten your spine while extending

the crown of your head up into the smog.

Take a moment to relax.

Before you gasp for oxygen,

draw in a big breath.

Feel the planet’s anxiety

stressing out your lungs.

Exhale the pain, suffering, and violence

of centuries of humanity gone wrong.

Inhale: let your breath

sink deeper into the world's shadow,

open the part of your brain that lives in denial.

Exhale: visualize yourself as a pedestrian

stuck on a traffic island during 5:00 rush hour.

You are trying to cross the street,

but there is no way you can cross to the

other side because the cars won’t stop for you.

Inhale: you have no choice

but to breathe in the fumes,

the greenhouse gases being discharged

from the tailpipes of the millions of cars.

Exhale: puff out the remaining poisons

as you transport your mind to the Arctic Circle.

With the Arctic summers becoming ice-free,

and the planet’s air conditioner is no longer working,

meandering jet streams cause cold spells and heat

waves as the west-to-east air currents weaken.

The Arctic is not at the periphery but is the core,

creating weather patterns around the cosmic orb.

Inhale: focus your mind on the ice sheet of Greenland.

Ice melting into water drains to the crevices.  

In ten seconds, water flowing down to the base

where the ice joins the rock, lubricates the ice

which slides off into the dark sea: rising tides,

sinking islands and causing millions of coastal refugees.

As the permafrost regions around Siberia and Alaska soften,

thermokarst landscapes erode

into bogs, pits, fissures, and caves. 

Ground ice melts, forming new Arctic lakes.

Sinkholes appear as the Earth burps methane gases,

self-reinforcing feedback loops, vicious circles,

of an unstable global warming crisis.

Exhale: take your mind to the top of the world,

to the Tibetan plateau where glaciers dissolve.

Less snow and smaller Himalayan glaciers mean

less water for billions of people who depend on

the once-mighty Asian rivers now trickling to the sea.

Take a huge inhale: direct your consciousness to the

open ocean, where autotrophic phytoplankton consume

carbon dioxide and release half the oxygen that we breathe.

Phytoplankton—the basis of the aquatic food chain,

eaten by krill, in turn, devoured by megaton whales.

As the ice shelves retreat,

it’s habitat loss for the critical algae.

Exhale: know that forty percent of these creatures have

declined in six decades due to decelerating ocean currents.

Thermohaline Circulation, the great ocean conveyor belt,

is affected by an influx of freshwater rushing into

saltwater seas, changing its salinity.

In-breath: dive into the underwater oasis of a coral reef.

Their calcium carbonate skeletons are biodiversity shelters

and island storm barriers, home to one-quarter of all marine life.

A symbiosis between coral polyps and one-celled algae is

being destroyed by higher tides and shifting temperatures.

Ancient partnerships bringing oxygen to the polyps

and carbon dioxide for photosynthesis

to algae—zooxanthellae--are dying.

With the colorful coral’s algae life-force gone,

the reef turns white, bleaching into the color of bone.

Out-breath: swim into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico.

The seabed is covered with oil pumped up from

the remains of plankton after millions of years.

Failed attempts at “bioremediation” after the

explosion of the oil rig, Deepwater Horizon,

haven’t brought back to life the tiny

and essential amoeba, foraminifera.

In-breath: on the West Coast of North America,

join the pteropods who are struggling

to survive in the souring sea.

Trillions of pounds of carbon dioxide are released yearly,

a quarter absorbed by the ocean, changing its chemistry.

The pH of marine water is now acidic and corrosive.

For the translucent sea butterflies,

it makes holes and grooves in their miniature shells,

the submerged wonder-world is becoming a jellyfish hell.

Inhale: follow a tsunami to a shoreline nuclear power reactor.

The aging power plant is cracking up, unleashing invisible,

deadly radioactivity into our biosphere.

Now allow your breath into every cell in your body, investigating

exactly where plutonium has lodged in your vital organs.

Exhale: In your mind, travel to the tropical rainforest.

You are the smoke arising from the burning trees

being cleared to raise methane-farting cattle for beef.

Home to half the world’s species of plants, animals and

microorganisms that could still help us find cures for disease.

The lungs of the planet,

eons of evolution burst into flames.

Rainforests used to provide a fifth of the world’s

oxygen are turned to vast plumes of smoke in moments.

Now blow out the tragedy of all the plants

and animals that have gone extinct because

of the short-term greed of human folly.

In-breath: beam yourself to Appalachia.

You are the rich soil on top of mountains

blown up by dynamite for coal extraction.

Rivers and streams of the mountainsides

no longer flow, water black from coal.

You are the toxic fumes emitted 

from the chimneys of coal-burning plants,

making children cough and die from asthma attacks.

Out-breath: find yourself in the brown clouds

around car-centered cities--Boston, Denver, San Diego.

Air pollution so thick it is a man-made volcano.

Global dimming of sunlight masks the full impact of global warming.

Jets flying across the world create weather disturbances

as particles of jet fuel seed clouds dropping acid rain

on places like the Rocky Mountains.

Higher temperatures mean fewer cold winters and longer

life cycles for insects like the Mountain Pine Beetle

whose infestations turn evergreens into rotting sticks.

Inhale: direct your eyes downward

to the wells of hydraulic fracking.

See the men injecting the fracking fluid

into the shaft, 600 toxic chemicals under pressure,

fracturing shale rocks, releasing natural gas,

methane leaching into the life-giving aquifer.

Exhale: back on arid land,

temperature changes on the ocean surface

alter rain cycles, land becomes desert

and desert brings drought.

Intensive corporate agriculture and overgrazing

cause famine, as soil depleted of organic matter

and minerals dries up and blows across continents

in massive dust storms in the wind.

Inhale and hold your breath:

go back in time into the Earth’s geology,

252 million years ago to the “Great Dying.”

Permian extinction event--a sudden

burst of a clathrate gun from the Siberian Traps

could have triggered a runaway greenhouse effect,

nearly wiped out all marine species, and almost

three-quarters of terrestrial vertebrate species.

With this sobering knowledge,

will Gaia’s story repeat itself?

Exhale and take in another breath:

hover over the Tar Sands of Canada

Blockades, civil disobedience, activism,

stop the pipeline to America, halting

dirty oil and the culture of petroleum.

Breathe out our present fate.

We can no longer ignore the earth war.

Breathe in truth: 

the only thing that will save us is          

collective action to stop the catastrophe,

adapting to a new planetary reality.

Breathe deeper in the truth:

it is your aware breath that counts,

critical for the future of humanity.

Exhale: allow the Beloved Community

to calm your spirit with faith that we can

develop a regenerative economy,

decentralize the food supply,

turn our inner power towards the sun.

Repurposing fast food parking lots into gardens

of organic slow foods of Earthly delights.

Inhale: from the people’s Climate Change March arises

the critical mass to direct evolutionary policy makers

into building ecological cities—arcologies—bringing us

into the fifth dimension we all long for in our hearts.

The space-time continuum, bound for the stars,

colonies of terrestrial bacteria terraform Mars.

Out-breath: arcologies like starships recycle wastes, 

as wastes become nutrients for other living things.

Arcologies shield us from inhospitable

environments on Earth and in Outer Space.

Integral containers for a new humanity

mean reclaimed land returns to

wilderness for endangered species.

Now force the remaining air from your diaphragm.

Pause for breath retention.

Since the Industrial Revolution,

one in four CO2 molecules

have been put into the atmosphere by humans.

As Occupy Wall Street protesters demand corporations

divest from fossil fuel, natural gas, and nuclear industries,

heirs of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil,

announce they will invest in a future of alternative energies.

They say it is good for business, as if free-market competition,

and profits can go on as business as usual.

Humans have never experienced a sea ice-free Arctic.

With jet streams and ocean currents disrupted,

how usual is this bizarre weather in North America and Europe?

Inhale: ask yourself,

should we allow these corporations, who have nearly

destroyed our atmosphere, to continue to lead our future?

Exhale: no!

Listen to me.

Put the remaining natural resources

into an Earth Bank of a united world’s people!

No more being fooled by the plutocratic families,

traveling to their elitist mansions on their Lear jets,

greenwashing the media with their public-relations lies.

It’s time to deactivate the mind viruses that cause ecocide!

Exhale: the people’s march was a social tipping point,

a threshold to a carbon-free, nuclear-free  

solar-powered world, an epic-making event,

when the political climate morphs toward

global justice and will not backslide again.

Now, fully exhaust your last breath, expelling

any religious mythos that no longer serves

our biosphere with an anti-scientific mindset.

Inhale: our global enlightenment,

the collective breath of mass movement.

Exhale: surrender to the cosmic powers of yoga,

the sacred unions that bond us with the holy web of Gaia.