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. 

The Mother Nature’s Prayer

Our Mother, who art within us,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy ways evolve, 

Thy will calls forth

This earth that is now our heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

And fill us with tenderness

As we repair our trespasses.

And lead us forth into communion,

And deliver us from dominion,

For thine is our wellspring 

And our grounding and our glory

Forever and ever, amen.

The original Lord’s Prayer is found in both Luke and Matthew. Jesus would have voiced it in Aramaic; a Latin version is here. I crafted my prayer to retain the elegant structure and cadence of the King James’ version, allowing its adoption into western hymnity. But I address the words not to a Lord in a supernatural Heaven but to the wondrous essence of Nature – our wellspring and our grounding — personified as Mother Nature.