Reading about how NASA astronauts
grew edible zinnias while orbiting
above us in space, I think of ways
we've chosen to live on this earth.
Red lilies and oleander were the first
flowering plants to thrive in Hiroshima’s
charred remains. In the rubble, gamma
rays made the blooms even brighter.
Fields of sunflowers, grown in Chernobyl,
change the radioactive dirt effectively,
scientists say. Meanwhile, Agent Orange
is everywhere in the soil in Viet Nam.
Flowers that have grown mutations,
though near Fukushima, may be
a mistake. Could that happen anyway?
On islands in the Tasman Sea, birds
mistake ocean plastics for food to feed
their chicks, and dead birds were found
having ingested single-use soy sauce
plastic bottles, shaped like a fish.
When you mistake the song of a bird
for the death rattle of another species,
It’s already over. The world is filled
with microplastics, like our brains.
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| Source: Heliograf |
Bonnie Naradzay’s manuscript will be published this year by Slant Books. For years, she has led weekly poetry sessions at homeless shelters and a retirement community. Poems, three of which have been nominated for Pushcarts, have appeared in AGNI, New Letters, RHINO, Tampa Review, EPOCH, Dappled Things, and other places. While at Harvard she was in Robert Lowell’s class on “The King James Bible as English Literature.” In 2010 she was awarded the University of New Orleans Poetry Prize – a month’s stay in Northern Italy – in the South Tyrol castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter Mary. There, Bonnie had tea with Mary, hiked the Dolomites, and read drafts of Pound’s translations.
