Midweek pick-me-up: 50 years of Earth Day with Jane Hirshfield's stunning poem of resistance against the assault of nature, science, and reality

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [Brain Pickings]( [Welcome] Hello, {NAME}! This is the Brain Pickings midweek pick-me-up: Once a week, I plunge into my 13-year archive and choose something worth resurfacing and resavoring as timeless nourishment for heart, mind, and spirit. (If you don't yet subscribe to the standard Sunday newsletter of new pieces published each week, you can sign up [here]( — it's free.) If you missed last week's edition — a special quarantine soul-sustenance release of the full recording of the 2019 Universe in Verse — you can catch up [right here](. And if you find any solace, joy, and value in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( – over these thirteen years, I have spent tens of thousands of hours and tremendous resources on Brain Pickings, and every little bit of support helps keep it – keep me – going. If you already donate: THANK YOU. “I don't think it would have been conceivable to me when I was seventeen that science would ever need defending, let alone by a poet,” the poet Jane Hirshfield says in her beautiful and poignant meditation on her memory of the first Earth Day in 1970, prefacing her reading at [the 2020 Universe in Verse]( celebrating 50 years of Earth Day. ([Tune into the global broadcast]( at 4:30PM EST on Saturday, April 25, to hear Hirshfield and a constellation of other radiant minds – including Patti Smith, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amanda Palmer, astrophysicists, artists, astronauts, and other seekers of cosmic truth and makers of human meaning – read and reflect on poems celebrating the science and splendor of nature.) [JaneHirshfield_NickRozsa.jpg?resize=680%2C1024] Jane Hirshfield (Photograph: Nick Rozsa) Hirshfield – one of a handful of living poets elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an artist who weaves the scientific worldview into her delicate cosmogonies of our inner lives, and an ordained Buddhist – is the founder of [Poets for Science]( which began when she found herself composing an anthem of resistance amid the strange world of “alternative facts” hammered off the bedrock of reality by the 2016 election. In the bittersweet archival piece below, reverberating with especial poignancy on this ambivalent 50th anniversary of Earth Day, my beloved friend [Emily Levine]( – who returned her stardust to the universe last year, having kindled my love of poetry and having left [“something of substance and sweetness in the mouth of the world”]( – reads Hirshfield’s poem at [the inaugural Universe in Verse](. [FROM THE ARCHIVE (2017) | Poetry as Protest and Sanctuary: Jane Hirshfield’s Magnificent Poem Against the Silencing of Science and the Assault on Nature]( [ledger_janehirshfield.jpeg?fit=320%2C482]( “The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife… Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics,” biologist and writer Rachel Carson admonished in her [prescient 1953 letter]( against the government’s assault on science and nature. She devoted the remainder of her life to this courageous mission of speaking inconvenient truth to power. In [writing Silent Spring]( which catalyzed the modern environmental movement, Carson was greatly emboldened by a line from a 1914 poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox: [“To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.”]( Poetry, indeed, has always been one of humanity’s sharpest tools for puncturing the shrink-wrap of silence and oppression, and although it may appear to be galaxies apart from science, these two channels of truth have something essential in common: nature, the raw material for both. To impoverish the world of the birds and the bees is to impoverish it of the bards and the biologists. Nature, with its fragile yet resilient magnificence, models for us what aliveness means and reminds us that we are mortal. Poetry wrests from it images and metaphors that chisel from the bedrock of our humanity a measure of graspable truth, teaching us how to live and how to die. Science mines nature for truth of a different order — it is our mightiest means of communing with reality, probing its mysteries, and gleaning from them some sense of belonging, of locating ourselves in the universe, understanding our place in it, and liberating ourselves from delusion. That common ground between poetry and science is what poet Jane Hirshfield sows with splendor in her poem “On the Fifth Day,” written for the 2017 [March for Science]( in Washington, D.C., protesting the anti-fact, anti-truth, anti-science political climate of the current American administration. It is my immense pleasure to share, with Hirshfield’s permission, this gift of a poem, read by comedian, philosopher of science, and my dear friend [Emily Levine]( — the person who first made me fall in love with poetry many moons ago. [55ddb3fa-a4e7-43c8-b29e-766eaf09fb45.png]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]ON THE FIFTH DAY by Jane Hirshfield On the fifth day the scientists who studied the rivers were forbidden to speak or to study the rivers. The scientists who studied the air were told not to speak of the air, and the ones who worked for the farmers were silenced, and the ones who worked for the bees. Someone, from deep in the Badlands, began posting facts. The facts were told not to speak and were taken away. The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent. Now it was only the rivers that spoke of the rivers, and only the wind that spoke of its bees, while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees continued to move toward their fruit. The silence spoke loudly of silence, and the rivers kept speaking, of rivers, of boulders and air. In gravity, earless and tongueless, the untested rivers kept speaking. Bus drivers, shelf stockers, code writers, machinists, accountants, lab techs, cellists kept speaking. They spoke, the fifth day, of silence. Join me in supporting Hirshfield’s wonderful [#PoetsForScience]( initiative, a kindred spirit to my own [The Universe in Verse]( project, then revisit Rebecca Solnit on [breaking silence as our mightiest weapon against oppression]( astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell on [how poetry and science enrich one another]( and Hirshfield on [the effortless effort of creative work](. Photograph of Emily Levine by [John Keatley]( [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week for more than 13 years, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and solace in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. (If you've had a change of heart or circumstance and wish to rescind your support, you can do so [at this link]( monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 RELATED READING/VIEWING: [The Universe in Verse: Complete Archive]( * * * [“Today, Another Universe”: Jane Hirshfield Reads Her Stunning Perspectival Poem of Consolation by Calibration]( * * * [Antidotes to Fear of Death: The Universe in Verse 2020 “Trailer”]( [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out each Wednesday and offers a highlight from the Brain Pickings archives for a midweek pick-me-up. 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