Welcome to National Poetry Month at The Other Pages. My name is Steve Spanoudis and I curate the series each year, with help and contributions from Bob Blair, Kashiana Singh, and (Nelson) Howard Miller. I’m coming to you from Coral Springs, Florida, on the eastern edge of the Everglades.

Today is celebrated as Earth Day, a day to be introspective and consider the state of the world we live in, and the world we leave to our children, and our children’s children. At the risk of being a little self-serving I’m going to  take a detour into The Republic of Dreams and talk about a character from Final Orbit, my seventh novel, and one which focuses heavily on environmental themes. That character is named Kashiana, in deference to one of my co-hosts, and she is a future astronaut and poet, looking down from an orbiting space station at the earth below, and commenting, in her own voice, on what she is seeing.

Only the first stanza appears in the book. The rest I added for the current theme of Wednesday Night Poetry (https://www.facebook.com/WednesdayNightPoetry) , Kai Coggin’s long-running invited guest and open mic series. If you have not had a chance to listen in, I recommend it highly.

The View from Above

I see tendrils of time creeping into reality,

Tongues of flame erasing the living things from the landscape

As a rampant red pen with searing strokes of deletion,

Or cruel fluid fingers drowning homes and habitats,

Removing a patina of life from the estuaries of the world,

As if our mother planet no longer desired her emerald adornments.

The brilliant snow capped mountains, and floating icefields

Have melted away to nothing, leaving lonely patterns

Of naked gray rock, and turbid gray waters,

Where no life lingers. Where nothing grows.

I am returning soon, to the great grayness below.

And as we humans cope as best we can,

With a world where wasteland replaces watershed,

Where wonders disappear daily,

We can only wonder why they did nothing for all those years,

Letting waste and greed rule their lives,

Letting opportunity slide through their fingers

Like the sands of the worlds beaches, now buried

Beneath the unstoppable onslaught

Of the gray waters that obey no laws,

Recognize no borders, and bow to no authority.

This is from Final Orbit, Not All Ghosts are Human, The Autobiography of Mario Ng

Available on Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R2FW42K).

Thank you for Listening. If you’re enjoying these commentaries, and the poem selections, please share them - either the text versions or the podcasts - on social media. You can find more at theotherpages.org, The Other Pages on Facebook or Tumblr, or at The Republic of Dreams (https://www.facebook.com/therepublicofdreams/)