The Poetry Inside Creation and Pollution

I am one to admit that poetry is not my strong suit.  I enjoy good poetry and am moved by it, however finding the original interpretation of it is a struggle for me.  I most always come away with an interpretation, but most of the time not the one that the poem was written about.  “State of the Planet” tripped me quite a bit.  I felt that I was all over the place reading it, finding it hard to follow.  In these next few paragraphs, I will unpack my experience in reading it.

Some of the poem did make sense to me even though I struggled with it.  I believe the author, Robert Hass, was commenting on the beauty and significance of nature and humankind, both individually and our relations.  For both to maintain beauty and elegance, maintenance and proper care are in order, which I also believe Hass was trying to point out.  In one stanza he wrote, “It will seem to be poetry forgetting its promise of sobriety to say the rosy shinings in the thick brown current are small dolphins rising to the surface where gouts of the oil that burns inside the engine of the car I’m driving oozes from the banks.”  This relates the pollution he causes to the suffering of the dolphins as a result.  I assume that when he wrote “rising to the surface” he meant that the dolphins were lifeless and floating to the top of the water.  It seems that he is pointing out the harm that we are doing to our environment.

I would like to point out one passage that particularly caught my eye.  Hass wrote, “…regarding a black outcrop of rock in the desert near a sea, charcoal-black and dense, wave-worn, and all one thing:  there’s no life in it at all.”  I have not even come up with a meaning for this passage, yet it still caught my attention.  I do love the wording and the way that it caused me to think over and over again on its meaning, yet I don’t have a solid understanding of it.  As I write about it now, I am pondering thoughts in my head and writing them freely on this page.  Perhaps the rock that is “charcoal-black” and lifeless is a result of constant pollution.  Previous to this passage, Hass talks about a bird.  He says, “…the bird that can’t know the amazement of its being there, a human mind that somewhat does…”  That makes me say “Wow!”  We have the ability to think and be free-willed.  A bird is a creature of habit with no soul, yet it is amazing.  God created this world in all its beauty and splendor and meaning and we are destroying it.  Perhaps Hass is getting the reader to think on deeper levels to better understand the sheer beauty and splendor of creation at its roots.