Sample poems by Ellery Akers

The Word That is a Prayer

One thing you know when you say it:
all over the earth people are saying it with you;
a child blurting it out as the seizures take her,
a woman reciting it on a cot in a hospital.
What if you take a cab through the Tenderloin:
at a street light, a man in a wool cap,
yarn unraveling across his face, knocks at the window;
he says, Please.
By the time you hear what he’s saying,
the light changes, the cab pulls away,
and you don’t go back, though you know
someone just prayed to you the way you pray.
Please: a word so short
it could get lost in the air
as it floats up to God like the feather it is,
knocking and knocking, and finally
falling back to earth as rain,
as pellets of ice, soaking a black branch,
collecting in drains, leaching into the ground,
and you walk in that weather every day.

Ellery Akers, from Practicing the Truth, Autumn House Press

Rachel Carson

I think of the way she bent over tide pools at night:
a woman stooped in the dark with her flashlight
as if she were stepping into the lit harness of her work.

I think of the way she lay under the stars
because they were medicine:

Tumors near the collarbone.
Pain in her spine.
Radiation. Krebiozen.
Arthritis. Iritis.
Sightless for weeks.
Listening as her friend read a draft out loud.

Remembering the robin that fell dead from a branch.

I think of the pages of notes about pesticides—

I moan inside—and I wake in the night and cry out silently for Maine—

And then, more notes about pesticides.

I think of the way the moon glazed the water
when she crossed out words and wrote other words.

I think of the way she knew that eels slid from brook to brook
and then to the sea.

I’m in luck,
because brown is cheapest, she said,
when she bought a wig
to cover her bald head at the Senate.

I could never again
listen happily to a thrush song, she said,
if I had not done
all I could.

They called her spinster.
Alarmist.
Communist.

I think of the eagles who came back because of her.
I think of her open gaze. Her resolve.
Her refusal to turn away from the wreck.

Ellery Akers, from Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance, Blue Light Press

Breathing

I love to feel as if I’m just another body, a breather
along with the others:
blackbirds taking sips of air, garter snakes
lapping it up with their split tongues,
and all those plants
that open and close and throw up streamers of oxygen:
maybe that cottonwood that tilts across the creekbed
is the very one that just sucked up carbon dioxide
and let me breathe, maybe I should hang a card around it,
Thank you for the next two minutes of my life,
maybe some of the air I just swallowed used to be inside the hot larynx of a fox,
or the bill of an ash-throated flycatcher,
maybe it just coursed past
the scales of a lizard–a blue-belly –
as he wrapped himself around his mate,
maybe he took an extra breath and let it out
and that’s the one I got.
Maybe all of us are standing side by side on the earth
our chests moving up and down,
every single one of us, opening a window,
loosening a belt, unzipping a pair of pants to let our bellies swell,
while in the pond a water beetle
clips a bubble of air to its shell and comes back up for another.
You want sanitary? Go to some other planet:
I’m breathing the same air as the drunk Southerner,
the one who rolls cigarettes with stained yellow thumbs
on the bench in the train station,
I’m breathing the same air as the Siamese twins
at the circus, their heads talking to each other,
quarreling about what they want to do with their
one pair of hands and their one heart.
Tires have run over this air,
it’s passed right over the stiff hair of jackrabbits and road kill,
drifted through clouds of algae and cumulus,
passed through airplane propellers, jetprops,
blades of helicopters,
through spiderlings that balloon over the Tetons,
through sudden masses of smoke and sulfur,
the bleared Buick filled with smoke
from the Lucky Strikes my mother lit, one after another.
Though, as a child, I tried my best not to breathe,
I wanted to take only the faintest sips,
just enough to keep the sponges inside,
all the lung sacs, rising and falling.
I have never noticed it enough,
this colorless stuff I can’t see,
circulated by fans, pumped into tires,
sullenly exploding into bubbles of marsh gas,
while the man on the gurney drags it in and out of his lungs
until it leaves his corpse and floats past doorknobs
and gets trapped in an ice cube, dropped into a glass.
After all, we’re just hanging out here in our sneakers
or hooves or talons, gripping a branch,
or thudding against the sidewalk:
as I hold onto my lover
and both of us breathe in the smell of wire screens on the windows
and the odor of buckeye.
This isn’t to say I haven’t had trouble breathing, I have:
sometimes I have to pull the car over and roll down the window,
and take in air, I have to remember I’m an animal,
I have to breathe with the other breathers,
even the stars breathe, even the soil,
even the sun is breathing up there,
all that helium and oxygen,
all those gases blowing and shredding into the solar wind.

Ellery Akers, from Practicing the Truth, Autumn House Press

We Have the Power to
Pull Back from the Brink

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.”
— Alice Walker

And so I stand here and call power.
I stand here and call water.

I call creeks. Lakes.
Pools. Sinkholes.
Tide pools with turban snails
and starfish—the ones
that have come back to the West Coast,
climbing over rocks on white tube feet,
resilient, as nature can be resilient.

I call shinbones of water skinnying down into sluice boxes.
Brackish water, sulfur-smelling water, sludge.
Rain in rain barrels,
clear water spilling over dams
and clear water that has never been dammed.

I confront the brink
even though I’m part of the brink.

I call snow geese sifting onto the rice fields, honking.
White-fronted geese. Brant.

I call the shapes of leaves: spatulate, cordate, pinnate, lanceolate.

I call the hole in the ozone.
Pollen. Luciferin. Chitin. 

I call rare plants and animals coming back because of the fire:
fishers, black-backed woodpeckers, globe mallows, morels.

I call fire.

And fire answers with its flaming mouth
and strange whining pronunciation
as it clears the underbrush

and the hole in the ozone answers that it is closing

and the leaves answer a twelve year old boy planted a million trees

And luciferin blinks on and off
and illuminates what has been buried so long
under tons of dark water

and pollen blows into the faces of climbers
who hung all night in slings from the St. John’s Bridge
to stop Shell drilling the Arctic

and water answers
Belize banned offshore oil
and protected the second largest barrier reef in the ocean

and my power answers
I’ve always known my hand could have been a leaf.
Hemoglobin and chlorophyll almost the same.
Only one atom different.

Ellery Akers, from Swerve: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Resistance, Blue Light Press