Poems by Martin H. Levinson

Every Day Is Earth Day

by Martin H. Levinson

From Canary Spring 2016

Martin grew up in New York City, whose geography is characterized by its coastal position at the meeting of the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean in a naturally sheltered harbor.

for seven billion human beings,
one to ten trillion trees, eight
point seven million species that
celebrate and suffer existence and

maybe a day at the beach with
Aunt Betty and her little red tote bag
packed with tuna fish sandwiches on ice
for a noontime lunch while gill-bearing

aquatic creatures seek provender of a
different sort, dolphins and porpoises
cavort lazily in the undulating waves, a
polar bear paddles in the Arctic Ocean to

find a stable ice floe, a camel naps,
perchance to dream, in the largest hot
desert in the world, a cockroach crawls
across a teak-stained hardwood floor in an

Amsterdam coffee shop as an Andean condor
scans the coast for carrion over Tierra del Fuego
and a Tasmanian devil eats a wounded wombat
hit by a car alongside a road in Australia. In the

Bay of Fundy a ferry founders killing all on board
but three hundred fifty three thousand babies come
into the world each day and the tides roll in and the
tides roll out and life goes on.