The State of the Planet

State of the Planet, by Robert Haas, in my opinion deserves to the Pulitzer Prize winning. It bring together very two crucial elements: simplicity and complexity. Some how he is able to mixed the two together and still have the reader come out with a clear understanding of what he was trying to get across to us in the first place.

My favorite line was:
"There is no silence in the world
Like the silence of rock from before life was."

How true is that? While reading more in depth on that particular verse I was mesmerized. It's hard to really see what life was like before we, animals or plants even existed on this earth. Rock and soil were here long before we came and I also find it interesting that we, according to Genesis, were brought up from the "dust of the earth." Maybe those two statements have something to do with each other. The fact that the entire poem starts out so simple, with a young girl and how rain is falling on her, then getting into thinking about life and our ecosystem...that blew my mind.

The line that reads:
"Poetry should be able to comprehend the earth,...
Something of the earth beyond our human dramas."

The first line starts out the beginning of stanza "2" and the last line ends stanza "2". That's the entire flow of the poem. What starts, must end, but it ends in the same way with the same idea being presented; much how a thesis is the beginning of a paper and the conclusion is the end.

Stanza six really brought out the biology side of things. Most of the poem deals with the beauty of what we see and how we may or may not interpret it, but this stanza tries to define the "state of the planet" as far as how we see it under a microscopic point of view. This is one of my favorite stanzas because it stands out from the rest of the poem, but still has a place in the ciaos of it all.

Overall, I see that our disconnection with nature is very much apparent. I think that with technology booming, cars running faster and people becoming less and less spiritual that we are going to continue to let ourselves disconnect from the very world around us. Eventually, we as human beings will totally disconnect from the world and ultimately God if we aren't careful. On the opposite side, those of us that love nature, that's awesome, but we should also try to look at who created all of this around us and understand that he holds a much higher understanding than we can even possibly imagine.

"It must be a gift of evolution that humans
Can't sustain wonder. We'd never have gotten up
From our knees if we could."