State of the Planet

When I first read this poem, I was having a lot of trouble understanding it. I felt like each section of the poem was changing and had nothing to do with previous one. I actually didn’t really understand it at all.  Poetry is so hard to grasp sometimes because it is the authors own interpretation of something. Whether it is nature, grief, or life in general, the author always has some kind of metaphorical meaning to every line of the poem. And sometimes that can be a challenge to break down. There were a few lines in the poem that I found interesting.  One was in the first paragraph of the first section. It says “A Japanese plum throws off a vertical cascade of leaves the color of skinned copper, if copper could be skinned. I really liked that imagery because I felt like he was making something that is usually viewed as plain and unattractive into something beautiful. He took the element copper and used that to describe the color of the leaves. Which also indicated to me that it was the fall season. Another quote that I liked was in the fourth section: “It must be a gift of evolution that humans can’t sustain wonder. We’d never had gotten up from our knees if we could.” I don’t think I fully understand this line but it was one that caught my attention. I don’t think evolution is necessarily a gift. If anything, it brings us further away from the truth of creation. Even as I sit here now and think about it, I feel like this line almost contradicts itself. Would the theory of evolution sustain wonder to cause people to get up form their knees? I’m not too sure about that one. Overall this was one poem that took a lot of thinking. My brain hurts.