Welcome to Top of Mind. When you click to subscribe, each Tuesday you’ll receive this newsletter featuring stories about climate and environmental activism, plus tips and motivation to help you stay engaged in our collective effort to build a more just and sustainable future.

National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman’s words at the presidential inauguration and the Superbowl reminded us of the power of poetry to call out social injustice and rekindled our love of the spoken word. So in honor of National Poetry Month, we asked four poets and environmental activists to write and read original poems that offer a window into their place on the planet.

Where I call home
Corn stalks stretch to the sky
Intertwined with cables
And rooftops

A backyard
Not a farm or a field
But we still call this home...

The worst crime I know men have committed is to turn nature into an oppressor.
I tend land; concrete gorges in Earth, pillared steel and brick,
burdenless and guiltless below its sky—the first witness and
last native to this island
at the joint of the ocean’s palm and the Hudson’s stretch...

In the morning, there was red
Red in my eyes as they opened to a blistered moon
Red through the windows of our little green home
Casting curtains in the living room of
red
in my friends that stumbled from their bed, red-faced, choking on
thick air sick with smoke and
red in the siren shriek of engines
under red drooped sun setting as it rose...

In memory, my feet feel planted in place
city soil hugs my shoes
freedom lives with the gusts of the earth—
a celebration of voice that I don’t question
you give gifts so gold: a northern cardinal's red hue
my monarch, a butterfly who flew north to dreams anew...

Reconnect with Your Muse

Looking for inspiration for your own poem? Here’s a tip: Get outside. Beijing-based NRDC Nature Program staffer Juan (Crystal) Wang has been practicing the art of noticing, finding peace in observing small details in the natural world around her: “Every day I find the scenery is different from the day before: Flowers are gone, thick leaves are shining in the sunlight.”
Six creative ways to bring the wild world into your daily life >

Listen: The Climate Crisis in Song

Through her latest album, Ignorance, singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman (who records and performs under the name The Weather Station) examines our collective climate trauma. The Toronto-based indie-pop artist incorporates jazz, chamber pop, and poetry into songs like “Trust,” excerpted below. The lyrics grew out of Lindeman’s despair at witnessing Canadian police attack and arrest members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation in northern British Columbia for attempting to stop the construction of the Coastal GasLink pipeline through their ancestral lands.

Bring me all the evidence,
the baskets of wild roses,
the crumpled petals and misshapen heads of reeds and rushes,
the bodies of the common birds, robins, crows, and thrushes,
everything that I have loved and all the light touches,
while we still have time.
Hear more from Tamara Lindeman >

Like what you’re reading? Share Top of Mind with a friend.

NRDC Top of Mind is delivered to your inbox Tuesday mornings. View our newsletter archive.

Received this from a friend and want to subscribe? Sign up here.

Have an idea to share with us or a topic you want to read more about? Reach out at [email protected].