Blue Marble
An eco-poem about the Earth, how we humans see it, and what we are doing to it
Blue Marble...
is an eco-poem about the Earth, how we humans see it, and what we are doing to it. The original pamphlet was written by Steve Thorp and illustrated and designed by Ruth Thorp (www.ruththorpstudio.co.uk). It was published by Raw Mixture Publishing in 2017. Three further stanzas were written for Earth Day 50 on April 22 2020 and these are published in this post below the main text.
A spoken version of the original poem (read by Steve) accompanied by music and video, is available on Daily Motion at https://dai.ly/x7yyakl .
Blue Marble (original version, 2017)
1
When you are flung so far away from Earth,
you first see the pristine curve and endless luminosity,
then marvel at the perfection of the blue marble
that hangs there. Your breath rises. You find
yourself unable to move; you think, ‘surely it was
never this beautiful when my feet were grounded
there?’ From out here you can believe in both God
and Science, and know truth in the astronaut’s
words: ‘that’s what it takes to build a civilisation’.
2
‘We are all travelling together’. The astronaut’s eyes
glow like the earth. ‘There is a paper thin layer –
a line barely hugging the surface of the planet;
all that protects us from the harshness of space’.
Eyes dim. Shadows fall and night’s black sky comes
alight with storm-crackle, volcano-blaze, star-dazzle,
city-shine, aurora-dance. Now it does not seem so
protected; everything feels breathtaking
and precarious as we travel the space waves together.
3
Thrown further out, and Earth is still shining.
Here the perspective is of distance and connection;
jewels set firm in a black sky. Out here is more emptiness
than matter and though infinity is beyond, your eye
is still drawn to home – an orbiting speck in the
pull and bind of a system at the edge of a galaxy,
that orbits the universe in a year of millions of years.
We are significant – insignificant; a centre that is no centre.
We are jewel, starlight and spinning dust.
4
Back towards Earth – this mesmerising exception,
this ordinary wonder – you notice glowing oceans
as your orbit follows the dayline. In night’s shadow,
the cities shine – colonies of beautiful parasites –
illuminated only because we hollow out our home.
The seas are rising; icebergs calve from glaciers,
roaring even as their requiems are sung.
Daylight reveals deep gashes in the land and
vast, sullen conurbations of energy, dirt-grab and drill.
5
The Universe is too vast for our minds to flow around.
There are a billion trillion stars and we float on the
edge of time – the distances always growing. One day,
our star will die. One day, our galaxy will be so far
from the next that its isolation will be complete.
We will be long gone by then and so our own isolation –
our existential inheritance – is all in the mind.
The oceans and mountains seem endless, and seven
billion is far too large a number for us to fathom.
6
Turn to the Earth and there is Gaia and her chemistry.
We are microbial souls, the stuff of earth, stars
and cosmos. All we have is this cosmic quantum
stuff and the molecules of our imaginations.
Here now is myth, growth and new life. Here, the name
of the sun god. Here, the gods of earth and ocean.
Here, stories that warn of the dangers of flying too high.
Here, songs sung of the perils of the underworld. And
meanwhile the ice melts. This is our folly and legacy.
7
A pianist plays his elegy; a plaintive melody as
green Arctic ice crashes into the sea. The sudden boom
sounds like the very lowest notes of his instrument.
A seabird spears across the frame. A polar bear,
chasing the icemelt, leaps into the water, swimming
desperately towards a receding future.
The boom time sounds like war. Green ice looks like
heaven. The unimaginable already imagines itself.
There will be many drowned and dying cities.
8
Home now to the warm earth. Small things swarm,
and all seems right with the world. Here the goddess
does her thing. The dichotomy between fertility and
destruction is right here in the soil and soul of this
good, good earth. Not long ago, there stood a
stone house – now hidden in the deep undergrowth.
This is what the goddess does – she covers over
our histories: we who are human; we who are animal;
we who are stardust…
…We whose consciousness is embodied,
animated, evolved, propagated, imagined.
9
Exploratory restlessness is one definition of our
humanity, and the foundation for all this was laid in
Gaia’s garden: a small place out in the West, made
with modest hopes from growing meadows. Oak trees
are witches’ familiars; magic is evoked in animate
symbols: Donkey. Red Kite. Earthworm. Millipede.
Sparrow. Cormorant. Seal. Shark. Octopus. Porpoise.
And on the beaches: the small and ancient shell people.
10
Seasons do not always provide an antidote to destruction.
When this garden grows into Spring and dies in Autumn,
the world will not be saved, your future will not be certain,
but your fingers will be grubby and tired and
your muscles will ache from squatting down here in the dirt.
You will have seen the start of something. Right here,
you may learn to feed yourself and to notice how all
beauty begins. Then, you will be flung so far away –
with your dreams of blue marble and jungle green.
11
And so we hurtle onwards on Gaia’s great spaceship.
Tending gardens. Singing Earthsongs. We are lost souls
with a capacity for love and connection; a propensity
for blind destruction. We are the animals who forgot;
the angels who learned not to fly. We are space-apes and
gardeners – tending our children and the land –
laughing wildly and dancing the world. It is too late.
It is not too late. This is the good Earth – blue marble,
green ice promise, rising oceans, falling tears.
12
Now Gaia lives small in nooks and folds, in sea-swell
and beach caves, in tended gardens, on coast paths –
and always deep, deep in the forest. She cares nothing
for the hollow men and the dark shadows they cast.
It is a healing time for the world, and infinity beckons.
The angels are gathering in a galaxy a million, million
light-years from here. Eager for their home, they prepare
to fly. Earth waits, and she will welcome them as
she always did. And we? We will be flung so very far away.
Blue Marble (2020)
New stanzas written for Earth Day 50, 22 April 2020
13
So, here is Earth. And here is this organism on the
edge of life. It is a familiar visitor, spreading like wildfire,
melting us away, leaving us perplexed and fearful.
Yet this blue marble carries the anticipation of something;
a way of life we have not yet learned to live — though
there is nothing too complex in the system, just a
reflection of the sphere in the mirror of our minds,
and the clarity that emerges when we meet each creature,
look them in the eye and learn to live their ways.
14
This story is about how we are embedded, and how we
lost our old ways — intuitive knowledge held in each
molecule and organism, each corner of the world,
each ecosystem. When we look up, we see the deep
dreams our ancestors saw; when we look down,
our knowledge returns to soil and sea. This lore
flickers on the edge of life, like a virus does; settles
for a myth of transformation. There are deeper
wisdoms here, but we may have to dig for them.
15
Today is an Earth Day, a name we humans have given
it, though the spirits of the place would prefer more
practical moves. Still, it is a moment on which things
could turn; a pause is always a gift of sorts. The gods,
for their part, are indifferent. Nothing is written in the
stars, though our fate rides on the nature of the turning.
And so we ride on orbits within orbits, faced with the
unimaginable, staring with bright eyes into a future
we could still — even now — bring into being…
Notes and references
Blue Marble is an eco-poem about the Earth, how we humans see it, and what we are doing to it. The original piece was inspired by Sarah Wint’s ‘Gaia Garden’, part of The Daisybus Gardens near Solva in Pembrokeshire. A new edition of the pamphlet - including the extra verses – will be republished in 2024.
A spoken version of the original poem, accompanied by music and video, is available on Daily Motion at https://dai.ly/x7yyakl.
One of the themes in the poem and the garden is the Overview Effect which, according to Julia Calderone, “occurs when you are flung so far away from Earth that you become totally overwhelmed and awed by the fragility and unity of life on our blue globe".(Quote from ‘Something profound happens when astronauts see Earth from space for the first time’ in businessinsider.com, August 31st 2015 - updated July 2019)
The astronaut’s quotes in the poem are taken from the film ‘Overview’ which can be found HERE on Vimeo:
The pianist playing his Elegy to the Arctic is Ludovico Einaudi. You can find the video and the story behind it at: https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/7570/ludovico-einaudi-performs-with-8-million-voices-to-save-the-arctic/
The idea of ‘microbial souls’ comes from Caleb Scharf’s remarkable book ‘The Copernicus Complex, The Quest for Our Cosmic (In)Significance’.
A virus was described by ‘an organism on the edge of life’ by Professor Ed Rybicki in 1990 (see this Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus)
I bought this book from a shop in Canterbury years ago. I love it , its format is humble, it is small and easily held in the hand. The images and text are quite stunning. Thank you for creating it and introducing me to the wonderful film linked on here.
unrelated - or perhaps not
https://bluemarbleeval.org/ Blue Marble Evaluation is a global initiative focused on training the next generation of evaluators to Think Globally, Act Globally and Evaluate Globally.