Well, of course I have to read my fracking poem
tonight of all nights.
It takes a while to get to the fracking but it's here.
I was asked to do this by Taylor Brorby, a young writer
from North Dakota who has seen his home landscape be
devastated by fracking.
And he edited a wonderful anthology
called Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories about Fracking
in America.
But, well, we have to go a few miles out of the way
before we get there.
And you'll recognize some, a beloved pair of twin brother
astronauts in this poem.
Homeland Security.
"What is a day to the astronaut floating 200 miles above Earth?
The Space Station whirling fifteen and a half times a day
around the planet while he drifts weightless
as if unmoving.
Sipping meals from a plastic pouch, is that how it works,
keeping everything contained against the drift?
His twin is down there donating biometrics to the database.
What is he here to them?
Their bones and hearts and brains,
that's what the instruments want to know.
Or what we've taught them to want.
The space twin will pay the higher price
for his unearthly habitation.
Bodies need gravity or some system
that simulates the magnetic pull of mantle and core.
He can see home from a porthole in space.
The planet from out here, sublime.
A blue and white ball so tender it
might be made of glass, just forming at the tip of the glass
blower's rod.
The Earth twin watches his brother lift
from the Cosmodrome, 0 to 17,000 in 12 minutes.
It feels like the hand of God has come down
and grabbed you by the collar and ripped you off the planet.
You know you're either going to float in space
or you're going to be dead.
What is Earth to the astronaut?
The exception to emptiness.
Boatloads of planets lie further in the black concealment
of space.
Best that we don't know their voraciousness and need.
Our home, we know, is troubled.
Yet still in the heyday of its experiment with life.
Thanks cyanobacteria for your evolutionary largesse,
the great oxygenation event that made us possible.
I'm writing this to find my way into the fray
over fracking, wild card as it seems now that I've
gone so far out into space.
No one wants to hear again about flaming water faucets,
exploited towns and farms, heartland riddled with quakes,
water poisoned and stuck back in the ground
to find its way home.
Space might be the only way to see what kind of sky we need.
And how the great carbonation event might be flipping the way
Earth does or doesn't do life.
We say Blue Marble.
We say Mother Earth.
We say home.
The astronaut says beautiful.
Earth, from space, says keep me.
The only thing that matters is the carbon.
So, Homeland Security means leave it in the ground.
Lock it up with soldiers standing guard.
Shelter it with grassland and trees."