Today is Earth Day, and library system wide we are celebrating it with programs and giving away ladybugs. It is also Friday, which is never a day I’d normally schedule a program. We are short staffed and it is busy enough after school. The hectic nature of this day reminds me of how silly it is to give the whole world one day, we can’t fit everything in one day, rather we should strive to be more aware all year long of our interdependence upon the earth and the impact of our actions. So we stretch our awareness of the earth through the years and through time. So my earth day poem is a little from the past to celebrate the present and the future.
Spring by Anacreon
See the Spring herself discloses,
And the Graces gather roses;
See how the becalmed seas
Now their swelling waves appease;
How the duck swims, how the crane
Comes from winter home again;
See how Titan’s cheerful ray
Chaseth the dark clouds away;
Now in their new robes of green
Are the plowman’s labors seen:
Now the lusty teeming Earth
Springs each hour with a new birth;
Now the olive blooms: the vine
Now doth with plump pendants shine;
And with leaves and blossoms now
Freshly bourgeons every bough.
c 572-488 B.C.E., Trans. Thomas Stanley, 1651, found in the Poetry Archive.
So as “the lusty teeming Earth/ Springs each hour with a new birth” let us try to do our best to protect the resources we have so that the children a further two thousand years from now can look on the same bounteous land.
Poetry Friday is hosted by Book Aunt this week, head on over to check out some other great poems!
Books, Dogs, and Frogs 
Yes, Earth Day should instead be Earth Every Day! I fear that our current way of life is not at all sustainable and do worry about what the future holds for my children.