Dear Earth

I thought I might be asked to write a love poem
to you, and it’s not that I don’t love you
in all your dry-rock greenglory, your pink-desert
and graycity palettes, your creatures with fins
or feathers or hooves that roam over or skim
or swim (even the spiders, even the ants)—
but I can hardly hear the birds for the street-digging
racket, and the bees are bloom-drunk, bumbling
daily through my open door, into my lap.
Also, there is sneezing. So dear Earth, while I do
love you, maybe it’s in that old comfortable way
of a long-married couple—ignoring the annoying
accepting the good, finished with sentiment
and rhapsody but spring-basking when it wells up
gladly settling in with the autumn wine, elementally
aware of one another’s season and mood.

It’s Earth Day and NaPoWriMo Day 22. Also, I was reading Walt Whitman during a sunny lunch. With bees.