About two dozen students have gathered in a cafe at Thomas College in Waterville to hear Meghan Sterling read her poems that deal with the climate crisis and the natural world.
Sterling is taking requests for poems from a gathered group of college students at a cafe at Thomas College in Waterville.
From the quirky, like ‘baseball,’ to the personal, like ‘motherhood,’ the students shout out words and Sterling finds one of her poems inspired by it. Sterling was invited here by climate activist Bella Sturdivant, one of the students, so many of the words shouted out by her classmates relate to the environment.
"Crow? I definitely have one for crow," she said.
“When the crow slept on the ground, it came to love the rock that was its bed, its stone dark head the sky hung upside down over the field, the rivers that bent their way toward a hollow moon," Sterling says.
Sterling explained to the group that some of the poems were written about a decade ago, when she was pregnant and living in North Carolina where at the time wildfires were choking the sky with smoke.
“Asheville, which was such a glorious artsy town, right? Was submerged in smoke. It felt like everything was being destroyed," she says.
After the wildfires, Sterling and her partner moved to Maine where she began writing about the experience. That's when she first got the idea for a book of poems inspired by the climate crisis.
“I was writing these fraught poems about what it is to have a baby and the world to be on fire. And I wanted to connect with other writers who were worrying about the same things," Sterling says. "And one day, I was at a reading, and this woman gets up and she begins to read a poem about her climate terror for her grandchildren. And I thought, oh my gosh, someone else.”
Sterling co-edited the work of 65 writers from around the state for a poetry anthology titled A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis, published in early 2020 with a forward from Gov. Janet Mills.
From her home in Gardiner, Sterling says that having a sense of community is one of the things that makes her feel better in the face of climate change. Processing her emotions about the climate crisis by writing poetry is another.
She reads an excerpt from her poem, titled Codicil, which was written during her time in North Carolina.
“To you, my daughter, whose Earth may not be my earth, whose Earth may be scorched with flames, whose Earth may be ripped apart by gunfire and blood, whose Earth may wilt under the heat of a too near sun, whose Earth may reveal her ocean beds to be desert skin, whose Earth may be hardened with sand and rock, whose Earth May wither dry as a peach stone," she says.
When asked what gives her hope about climate change, Sterling says, "I really love this generation of kids. I think they're pretty amazing, accepting interesting, powerful group of humans. And so I think getting to know young people and having a child is. It actually fills me with hope."
And that hope for the next generation is reflected in the end of the poem:
“To you. I bequeath all the courage and all the birds and flowers, waters and stones, all the toughness of trees and the heart to love enough to be strong enough, stronger than we were," she says.
Sterling is currently organizing a poetry festival in Gardiner for the final weekend in May. She intends to keep teaching climate poetry workshops throughout the year.
