A Summons

 by Bob Ambrose

Who will mourn the ‘Age of Man’ 

    when the epoch of Adam is done? 

His dream of dominion has cursed the Earth, 

    our sweat has stained the ground. 

Now we swagger into the Anthropocene 

    where sickness shatters the lands 

and death depletes the seas. 

    When cycles of life spin askew 

Gaia cries out for her creatures 

    to tend the afflictions of Earth. 

Listen – set aside your books to hear – 

    she speaks her truths in feral tongues. 

In the howling crown of a wildfire, 

    in the crumbling face of a glacier, 

in the cracking of ice on the Arctic Sea 

    a summons comes to humankind. 

Go make an ark of living earth 

    woven from grasslands, rivers, and trees, 

ten thousand arks across the globe, 

    refugia fit for Gaia. 

Make an ark of the boreal forest, 

    an ark of the chaparral. 

Set aside the high desert, 

   keep the tundra intact. 

Consider each reef a cathedral 

    and every swamp a sanctuary. 

Let lawns revert to meadows 

    and plant a trillion trees 

for a fever flushes the face of Gaia, 

    her time of trials has come. 

Within this age an Eden awaits. 

    In your hands, the seed.