April 22 is EARTH DAY -- Remember the TREES

Can planting billions of trees save our planet?

Trees help cleanse the air by intercepting airborne particles, reducing heat, 
and absorbing pollutants such as carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide. 

Trees are sound barriers -- as effective as stone walls in stopping sound.

     Today this blog celebrates TREES via poetry by Australian visual artist and poet, Belinda Broughton -- her performance-poem "EDGES" has been part of an exhibition, Solastalgia at Fabrik, in Lobethal, South Australia -- and here in this video she performs the poem in front of a drawing that she created with charcoal from her recently burnt home, tragically part of Australia's recent and widespread outbreak of wildfires.  
     I include below, some of the opening and closing lines of Broughton's poem;  after these, I offer a link to the print version of the complete poem.

     Edges     by Belinda Broughton

     Who will speak for the trees? Who     will speak for the trees?
     Who will speak for the forest, for that part
     of the natural world? Because it’s all nature, let’s face it,
     even this crass world with its concrete and steel,
     its plastic paint and polluted pavements.
     It   is   nature.

     Can you sense     that there is no divide
     between one     and the next, between you
     and the person standing next to me?

     Can you sense that we are all just fragile bodies,
     fragile bodies on a fragile earth?
     fragile bodies like your dog with his
     welcoming eyes, or your budgie,
     or the budgies in flocks of thousands out on the open plains?

and here are the final lines:                  

     You rescue the tattered butterfly that is
     beating its wings on the pane.
     You rescue them.

     You rescue them because …

     you rescue them because
     you have no choice

     and you rescue them because
     you have no edges.

     You have no edges because

     everything, 
     every   thing,
     every   single   thing

     is you.

Here is a link to the complete print-version of EDGES
and, once again, a link to the performance video.

And here is a link to a SEARCH for previous posts in this blog for "earth day".