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Invocation

By Everett Hoagland

Architect of icebergs, snowflakes,
crystals, rainbows, sand grains, dust motes, atoms.

Mason whose tools are glaciers, rain, rivers, ocean.

Chemist who made blood
of seawater, bone of minerals in stone, milk

of love. Whatever

You are, I know this,
Spinner, You are everywhere, in All The Ever-
Changing Above, whirling around us.

Yes, in the loose strands,
in the rough weave of the common

cloth threaded with our DNA on the hubbed, spoked
Spinning Wheel that is this world, solar system, galaxy,

universe.

Help us to see ourselves in all creation,
and all creation in ourselves, ourselves in one another.

Remind those of us who like connections
made with similes, metaphors, symbols
all of us are, everything is
already connected.

Remind us as oceans go, so go we. As the air goes, so go we.
As other life forms on Earth go, so go we.

As our planet goes, so go we. Great Poet,
who inspired In The Beginning was The Word . . . ,

edit our thought so our ethics are our politics,
and our actions the afterlives of our words.
Added: Thursday, June 21, 2018  /  From "Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology," (University of Georgia Press, 2018). Used with permission.
Everett Hoagland

Originally from Philadelphia, PA, Everett Hoagland was Poet Laureate of New Bedford, MA 1994-1998, and he is Professor Emeritus at UMass Dartmouth. His poetry has been published in many periodicals, including the American Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Iowa Review, Callaloo, Cross-Cultural Poetics, The Boston Globe, The Providence Journal, Spare Change, and the UUA World. Recent anthologies that contain his work include: The Best American Poetry, S.O.S. A Black Arts Reader, Stand Our Ground, Liberation Poetry, Resisting Arrest, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. Hoagland's books include  ... Here ... , Ocean Voices, The Music & Other Selected Poems. He has read his work to audiences all over the USA and in Cuba, China, and Ghana. He has received the Gwendolyn Brooks Award, the 2015 Langston Hughes Society Award, two Massachusetts Artists Foundation fellowships, a Massachusetts Humanities Foundation Fellowship, and two Massachusetts Local Cultural Council grants.

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