Two
pieces from the Sunday New York Times caught my attention this morning. The first piece is on pages 30 and 31 of the
newspaper. The opening paragraph reads,
“After three years in office, the Trump administration has dismantled most of
the major the president promised to undo.”
It goes on across two full pages listing: All 98 Environmental
Rules the Trump Administration is Revoking or Rolling Back.
The
second piece from the Magazine, is this week’s poem selected by Naomi Shihab
Nye. The poem printed out below is one
by Ellery Akers, from her recently published book Swerve….
Each
piece stands alone, but together. The
matter of fact writing in the first, are made to taste bad and smell bad by the poetry
of the second.
At
Any Moment, There Could Be a Swerve in a Different Direction
There was a moment
when shooting egrets for feathers
became wrong.
There was a moment
when the Wilderness Act
changed the lives of billions of
blades of grass.
I remember the moment when a river
that used to catch fire
turned from flammable to swimmable.
A swerve smells astringent, like
the wind off the sea;
it tastes red, the way Red Hot
cinnamon mints
burn in your mouth;
it’s heavy, the way the weight of
letters is heavy,
arriving in sacks at the Senate;
it sounds like the click of needles
as hundreds of thousands of women
knit pink hats;
it looks like a coyote, crossing
the freeway to go home.
