Sadness and Peepers

I'm in my tent. I woke up hearing peepers and a big bullfrog. I can't believe there is wireless in this campground. It's a KOA in Woodstock, New York. I'm here with my daughter for a workshop called "Talking With Plants."

Around dawn, all the peepers and frogs and crickets were singing in interaction with each other. It was utterly musical, truly a symphony. All one could do was listen. Clearly, they were listening to each other. The rhythms and melodic weavings were perfectly complex. It was awesome.

Then a very loud jet engine came over. I could tell they were all listening to that too, the peepers and frogs and the dawn birds that had been starting, because they altered their sounds as it came, just as they had been altering them in response to each other. But the jet plane wasn't listening back. It wasn't interacting. It was only making noise. Very very loudly. And for a long long time.

It threw the whole symphony off. I could hear them trying to absorb it into their music, but it wouldn't play with them.

Then the cars started in, more and more of them out on Route 32, very loud ones. Before long, the whole symphony had disintegrated into noise, random and confused. It broke my heart.

Poetry's job, one of the main ones, certainly, must be to help us learn to listen, to become part of the symphony on this incredible planet. Maybe then we will begin to hear ourselves, to hear what we sound like, and to change our activities accordingly.

I keep thinking about Eileen's silence poems. They are part of this too.