POPULATION POEMS AND SONGS
Complete List of Poems and Songs
The Earth Laughing
Population Pressure Song
Warning Bell
Rabbits
Changes in the Wind
For Vermont's Sake
Modern Psalms - Psalms783
The Earth Laughing by Karen I. Shragg
I woke up on this beautiful
Earth Day morning and heard
the Earth laughing
Her lilacs were shaking
Her tulips were full of dew from her tears
Dropped of a nervous laugh
Not a joyful one
A laugh that comes from a place
of disbelief
As her soaring eagles observed
The holes drilled into her oceans
The caverns dug into her mountains
The efforts to squeeze the last drop
Of resources out of her
Gave her reason to laugh
The kind of what-are-you-thinking laugh
And she laughed with a shudder of
mourning dove wings at this peculiar species
This two legged creature so smart in some ways
So naïve in others..
"To have conquered flight
To have reached my moon
To tap into my resources and turn them into
Schools and libraries, to hospitals and universities
Speaks to your cleverness"
she said through a whisper of a cloud
"But to behave as if I can keep up with your inventions
To act as if I have enough fuel to fund your
Never ending wars
To ignore the signs of your damage which
Are melting my icecaps drowning my islands and
Killing my polar bears as you
populate my landscapes far beyond their capacity.
My water cycles' ability to quench your thirst
Is at best naïve and at worst self-destructive
I am exhausted!
Please know I cannot offer what you demand of me
I cannot offer infinite resources that took me
Billions of years to create
I cannot offer you
What you ask of me, by the 9,000 more of you added per hour
For my resources cannot supply
An endless stream of you and your modern ways
And the more of you that get that in your hearts
As well as your heads
The sooner I will heal and be able to sustain
A saner number of you and my other creatures
which aren't as clever
Or naive.
Art forms touch our souls in unique ways. We are
grateful to the poets and song writers who have written
the works below and invite any poet or song writer to
submit a piece for addition to this section of our web
site.
Population Pressure Song (c) 2008 Calvin Stewart & Joice Marie
Listen to: "Population Pressure Song"
Pop pop, goes the population
Got to stop, the population
The Big Apple's mighty fine
But I don't wanna wait in line
Even if you think it's wrong
Help me sing this not so funny, funny little song
Sing along, sing along
The Population Pressure Song
Pop pop, goes the population
Got to stop, the population
While we still have our woods
In our quiet neighborhoods
Even if you think it's wrong
Help me sing this not so funny, funny little song
Sing along, sing along
The Population Pressure Song
Pop pop, goes the population
Got to stop, the population
Bring the nation down to size
Do your part to minimize
Pop pop, goes the population
Got to stop, the population
Human sardines in a can
Time for us to take a stand
Even if you think it's wrong
Help me sing this not so funny, funny little song
Sing along, sing along
The Population Pressure Song
Pop, goes the population
Got to stop, the population
Carry out what you carry in
One child is a line of kin
Even if you think it's wrong
Help me sing this not so funny, funny little song
Sing along, sing along
The Population Pressure Song
Sing along, sing along
The Population Pressure Song
Calvin Stewart & Joice Marie have been co-writing songs for 2 years
now and see music as a way of communicating and expressing the
concerns we all face as residents of planet earth. Inspirations come
from their natural surroundings and color their songs. Joice resides
in the Upper Valley between the White and Green Mountains. Calvin
resides near Okeechobee Lake, the second largest fresh water lake in
the US in the heart of Florida , the headwaters of the everglades.
79 words...
Listen to: "Population Pressure Song"
Warning Bell
As the population continues to swell,
I hear the deafening sound of a warning bell.
Surely you can hear it too.
Growth is accelerating and changing the view.
Consuming and growing desires leave many wishing for
more.
And up goes another big box store.
Oh Vermont, I am pleasantly shocked with
your beauty.
I vow to make your preservation part of my life duty.
I shed tears of gratitude and joy upon returning to your
gently rolling hills.
I appreciate you for your lack of consuming frills.
I never tire of your seasons.
In Spring and Summer, your luscious greenery.
In Fall, your palette of vibrant colors.
In Winter, your frozen waterfalls streaming down the
faces of the interstate ledges.
And your virginal white blankets of sparkling crystalline
flakes upon your fields.
All people deserve to be so blessed,
To faithfully and proudly proclaim their homeland to
be the best.
I’ve gone beyond my prayers,
I declare a fervent plea,
Fellow Vermonters, let=s lead the way and commit to preserving
our bounty, our gem.
There is no us versus them.
Spread our notions of sustainability to other lands.
This worthy cause needs many hands.
All people deserve quality versus quantity.
We must work diligently to make it a reality.
Sex education is a start.
But the curriculum is missing a part.
We need to include such words as voluntary simplicity,
global warming, sustainability and impact of decision.
Go to www.vspop.org and study their mission.
We share a small planet.
Everything we do has a direct effect.
What makes Vermont and Our Earth important to you?
Future generations in all lands and times deserve valuable
natural resources and a beautiful view.
I’ll act like what I do makes a difference.
And I pray that you will too.
Jeanette Hurdle grew up on a small farm in Chelsea,
VT, where her family grew much of their own food (vegetables
and meat), cut their own firewood and grew potatoes for
sale to their neighbors. Her mother resides in the family
home built by Jeanette’s father’s ancestor,
Nathan Flint, in 1798. She now lives in Barre, Vt. Jeanette’s
book “Opened from the Inside Out” is available
online: http://www.lulu.com/content/22667
Jeanette Hurdle on the right with her sister Nola Howder
on the left.
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Guy at the church says write one about population
and all I could see was rabbits,
red eyes in swelling cages
and their seeming sole intentions
to eat and make more rabbits
as the pellets diminish.
What is so blind about us humans
that we create messes of our own undoing,
global warming and whatnot better left
to future generations
or hope one of our wars will wipe out half,
leaving the lucky half unscathed
by whatever it was got the dead ones,
and the dead ones not rotting up a pestilence
nor the leveled buildings and trashed bridges
prove inconvenient as they start over,
a little wiser for their brush with death
or more likely cause it seems to permeate our genes
and those of our furry friends clawing the cage,
reducing themselves again by increasing their lot?
Geof Hewitt, Vermont’s reigning poetry slam champion,
works for the Vermont Department of Education and lives
in Calais with his wife Janet. His most recent collection
of poems, Only What’s Imagined, is available
at better bookstores or directly from The Kumquat Press,
P.O. 51, Calais, VT 05648.
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Changes in the Wind/No More
Chorus
There are changes in the wind,
There are changes in the wind.
Come one, come all and hear the call,
There are changes in the wind.
How many people is too many,
As we reach 6 billion strong,
Pull your head up from the sand,
The choice is in the hand.
Of every woman, child and man.
Chorus.
There is no grave premonition,
Than a world that is run out of room,
12 years more, uncontrolled,
Would add a billion to the fold,
And greater burden upon the land.
Chorus.
The world will see discord, drought and famine,
As the natural resources disappear,
And to feed the human masses
The earth’s fulfillment passes,
To a wasteland wild of sand.
Chorus
No More
No more copulation when it leads to procreation,
‘Cause there’s too much population in this world
of ours.
Jeanie Fitchen is a folk singer and novelist from Florida
and winner of the 2001 florida Folk Heritate Award. Her
songs mostly relate to the environment. This song
is from her CD Roads which can be ordered post-free from
her web site www.jfitchen.com or
from amazon.com
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For Vermont’s Sake
The deeryards aren’t empty because the turkeys
are too many –
there’s usually plenty of acorns and beechnuts
to go around.
Their yards are empty, their safety gone, because there
are
too many people in their way,
in too many places.
We need someone to save Vermont –
to buy the woods, the mountains
and
the flats,
to stop the building, ravaging and rape.
Once mountainsides were darkest green,
the stars profuse in blackened skies,
but fallen trees make way for named estates
lighted now to shine out at night.
People come to ends of the road
to get away, so they say,
only to shine spotlights
showing all the world where they are.
So we can’t see the stars anymore, and
far too fast the land is disappearing –
the foxes’ dens on meadowed slopes,
the owls’ nestholes and woodpecker holes,
beavers’ lodges and dams – torn away
as humankind becomes most unkind
and comes to live in the wilderness.
Look to the south, Vermonters!
That’s us in 20 years: polluted, condoed,
strip-malled to satisfy the whims and
pockets of developers. Look to the south,
just try to find the fields and rivers,
the trees that lived there once.
Our deeryards aren’t emptying because the
turkeys are too healthy. They’re empty
because there’s too much building that takes
away their land.
So who will come to save it?
Genie Rayner is author of Song of the Blessing
Trees, a novel about the results of humanity's
destructive relationship with the earth, a poet and
an artist. She is also the Founder of LadyBirch
Creations and co-founder with Christopher Laro of
BirchDel Poets. Go to www.LadyBirchCreations.com for
details and to inquire about her writing and nature
workshops.
Modern Psalms-Psalm 783
I perceive a great insanity
Overwhelm humanity
And the biosphere,
The latter horribly troubled
By humanity’s own insanity.
As human population gets thicker,
It also gets sicker.
And I perceive
This terrible disease
Infected humans so deceives
That many refuse to believe
The true etiology of their malaise.
And humankind’s overall blindness
Is its greatest unkindness
To the biosphere
Whose contagion
Comes from every infecting nation.
Bizarre behavior permeates
Leaders and led of every state,
All resulting in social hate.
All the result
Of the gross insult
Of disappearing elbow room
And mad competition to survive
And stay alive
In a dying world entombed
In rabid desires to devoir
The very last resource
Down to the last beast and plant,
Down to the final worm and flower!
Mad, mad, mad mankind,
You couldn’t tell
In your overheating hell
The difference between your mind
And your fat behind!
Composed Patrick Bradley, November 9, 2003
Patrick William Bradley Jr., the “Modern Psalmist,” was born in Plattsburgh, N.Y. in 1935, and spent much of his life on Grand Isle where he was a teacher. He has written some 3,000 Modern Psalms, thousands of other poems, two epics, and twelve short stories, many predicting our modern world’s problems as much as five decades ago. He has attended eight universities in the U.S.A. and France and is the recipient of literary awards. He is currently a wheel chair-bound and physically challenged resident of the St. Albans Healthcare and Rehabilitation Center in St. Albans. He continues to write in French and English.
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