Another week begins.  The Olympics in Tokyo are in full swing.  I watched some of it on TV.  The main event of my weekend was attendance at the Geneva Art Fair.  I had several memorable conversations with artists.  Life at best, is an art-form, a practice that reveals beauty and meaning.  I aspire to endless discovery.  Always I am on the lookout for others who share the same angle of view.

This poem seems apt for these times in which we live.  It is impossible to ignore, dismiss, or discount global warming as an effect of the burgeoning human population, our demand upon the planet for all that we desire.  Another mid-summers day in the high 90s is a drumbeat of alarm, like the sound of distant war drums.

I thought this poem was a precise statement of the fragility of our biosphere.

EARTH EVANESCENT

By Maxwell Anderson

If other planets dark as earth
About dim trembling stars
Carry frail freight of death and birth,
Wild love, and endless wars;

If from far, unseen motes in flight
Life look down questioning
This helpless passage through the night
Is a less lonely thing:

But if unchained through empty space
Drift only shell and fire
What seeks the beauty of this face,
What end has its desire?

A candle in a night of storms,
Blown back and choked with rain,
Holds longer than the mounting forms
That ride time’s hurricane.

ABOUT THE POEM
Maxwell Anderson was born on December 15, 1888, in Atlantic, Pennsylvania. The recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for his play, Both Your Houses, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Winterset and High Tor, Anderson founded the Playwrights’ Producing Company in 1938. He died in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1959.

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