Rise in the Sea
by Cleve Mathews

Liquid womb of life on earth
breathing clouds of sustenance,
rising eons to reshape
our continental estates;
how apt to hold in awe
your rolling waves of fate.

Yet how we’ve used your bounty
of comfort, food and voyaging –
making seas of plastic waste,
filling deeps with pesticides.
And now your quickened rising
portends disastrous tides.

War and poverty are costs routine
but sinking shores exceed our thought,
demanding common acts of wonder.
Can we rethink our shrinking nations,
move the ports we cannot dike,
prepare to fend the inundations?

Start with passion stirring songs
to open hearts, and then join hands
in overturning our ruinous use
of nature’s protective mantle.
Give our grandchild a legacy earth
worth lighting a chaliced candle.

Author's Note: A study in the April 16, 2009 issue of Nature warns that our ice sheets may be far more vulnerable than we believe, and that it may be only a matter of decades before cities like New York are turned into swampland. When I read scientists were finding us increasingly vulnerable to rising seas from global warming, I suddenly found new depth in Carolyn McDade’s line “rise in the sea” in her song “Spirit of Life.” When I get such insights I try to express them in a poem.
    Cleve Mathews is a retired journalist who first joined a Unitarian church in the early 1950s. As a journalist he was an editor at the New York Times, the first news director of NPR, and a journalism professor at three universities. As a UU he has served many good causes in several cities.