Earth Day 2023

Earth Day was very special to Gene. His youth in Oakland was filled with vegetable gardens, fruit for wine, and a closeness to the seasons that deepened with age. Here is a 2018 poem from Gene that combines all these threads, titled “Mother Earth Day.”

 

My mother Katie was born in Oakland, 1905,
the year of the first official Mother’s Day.

She would have appreciated the link
to Mother earth as her immigrant parents
brought love of nature from rural Italy.

Katie was seduced by her father’s
vegetable gardens which fed us in hard times,
and her small plot of geraniums near the bay of St. Francis.

Yet the clerical church around her was little aware
of earthly spirituality for another half century
with the insights of Teilhard and environmentalism.

A celibate male clergy tended to separate
God from earthiness except as distant creator.
Our goals were to leave this vale of tears

for mythical places of our imagination.
Few preachers would find the Lord
in the eyes of cats and dogs.

–Eugene C. Bianchi, Athens, GA, 2018