Wednesday – Earth Day
To observe Earth Day 2026 I’m repurposing an old essay, written 14 years ago. Mary Oliver’s “Ghosts” seems appropriate given how the occasion calls for us to both acknowledge horrific damage to the environment and hold onto hope that we can turn things around. Oliver looks both back and forward—back to horrific instances of devastation and forward to the truth, written in “the book of the earth, that “nothing can die.”
Oliver references whites slaughtering the buffalo herds, sometimes for meat, sometimes to eradicate the Native American food supply. The slaughter also receives treatment by Ojibwe/Chippewa author Louise Erdrich. In the Mighty Red she describes the size of the herds, which may have numbered 30 million animals at their height:
After crossing the Red River sometime in the 1830s, a priest climbed a tree seeking a spot where he could safely observe an approaching herd of buffalo. There he witnessed a deranging spectacle–the buffalo stretched all the way to where they disappeared into the line between sky and earth. He was forced to stay in the tree for three days as they passed, passed and migrated, three days of horizon-to-horizon buffalo. He nearly died of thirst. “You may judge now the richness of these prairies,” he wrote later. There was no end to the beasts. Just like it seems there is no end to us, in our billions. But everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.
We see mention of the elimination in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. In a particularly haunting scene that twists the heart, a few remaining buffalo, crazed by the slaughter of their comrades, commit suicide:
“The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved,” said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. “The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live.”
In “Ghosts” Oliver shows train passengers engaging in the slaughter:
Passengers shooting from train windows
could hardly miss, they were
that many.
Afterward the carcasses
stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned
with slopes of white fat,
black ropes of blood – hellhunks
in the prairie heat.
Over a century later the poet observes that there are still traces of the once great herds:
Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth…
Rather than only despair over the devastation that whites have visited upon the buffalo, however, she talks about what one must do to “coax them out again.” The answer lies in “the people dancing.”
For the Lakota Sioux, every being shares the same spiritual essence, called Wakan Tanka, which is ritually honored through dancing and other ways. Oliver’s own dance is her poem, and her role as a metaphorical dancer is to “notice” (a word that appears repeatedly throughout the poem) and tell us what she sees. Put another way, the poet is a seer who uses words to convey her vision. The tongue, Oliver says, is “the sweetest meat.”
One thing she notices is the ecosystem that grew up around the buffalo herds. Reading the journal of Meriwether Lewis (of the Lewis and Clark Expedition), she notes how a sparrow’s nest is woven from buffalo hair.
While Oliver is identifying with Lewis as observer here, she also identifies with the day-old chicks. Even though they have “left the perfect world” and fallen into “the perils of this one,” they are also lying in “flowered fields.” In other words, our world is filled with both immense beauty and terrible danger, and it is our responsibility to record what has passed and to “notice” what can still be seen. We are called upon to be as vulnerable and open as these young chicks.
The poem ends on a visionary note very much in the spirit of Earth Day: Oliver dreams about a newly born red buffalo calf being tongued by its mother “in the fragrant grass/ in the wild domains,” and she wants to enter this communion. In the vision of perfect peace and tranquility that is the dream and the poem, that which has “gone away into the earth to hide” momentarily flares forth. Through our imaginations, it is born again. Oliver is reading from the Lakota “book of the earth” in assuring that “nothing can die,” despite all the damage done by the shooting train passengers of our world. She can see the ghosts of the past and helps us to see them as well.
Ghosts
By Mary Oliver
1
Have you noticed?
2
Where so many millions of powerful bawling beasts
lay down on the earth and died
it’s hard to tell now
what’s bone, and what merely
was once.
The golden eagle, for instance,
has a bit of heaviness in him;
moreover the huge barns
seem ready, sometimes, to ramble off
toward deeper grass.
3
1805
near the Bitterroot Mountains:
a man named Lewis kneels down
on the prairie watching
a sparrow’s nest cleverly concealed in the wild hyssop
and lined with buffalo hair. The chicks,
not more than a day hatched, lean
quietly into the thick wool as if
content, after all,
to have left the perfect world and fallen,
helpless and blind
into the flowered fields and the perils
of this one.
4
In the book of the earth it is written:
nothing can die.
In the book of the Sioux it is written:
they have gone away into the earth to hide.
Nothing will coax them out again
but the people dancing.
5
Said the old-timers:
the tongue
is the sweetest meat.
Passengers shooting from train windows
could hardly miss, they were
that many.
Afterward the carcasses
stank unbelievably, and sang with flies, ribboned
with slopes of white fat,
black ropes of blood – hellhunks
in the prairie heat.
6
Have you noticed? how the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins. Have you noticed?
how the immense circles still,
stubbornly, after a hundred years,
mark the grass where the rich droppings
from the roaring bulls
fell to the earth as the herd stood
day after day, moon after moon
in their tribal circle, outwaiting
the packs of yellow-eyed wolves that are also
have you noticed? gone now.
7
Once only, and then in a dream,
I watched while, secretly
and with the tenderness of any caring woman,
a cow gave birth
to a red calf, tongued him dry and nursed him
in a warm corner
of the clear night
in the fragrant grass
in the wild domains
of the prairie spring, and I asked them,
in my dream I knelt down and asked them
to make room for me.
We can use this day to rekindle our own connection and ask for admittance.
Further thought: I wonder if the passage
Have you noticed? how the rain
falls soft as the fall
of moccasins.
alludes to the Sara Teasdale’s unsettling “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which imagines the world recovering after nuclear warfare has wiped out humanity:
Then Will Come Soft Rains
By Sara Teasdale
(War Time)
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
I suppose there’s some consolation in knowing that nature will continue on, regardless of what we do to ourselves. Still, homo sapiens are such remarkable creatures that it would be tragic if they disappeared from the scene. Better to learn how to live together.
