We are one and the same

Celebrate World Poetry Day with this magnificent poem by Kaija Aroga, author of Bill Belfast short stories

A late entry in the World Environment Day 2022 Mini-Poetry Competition, the adjudicator, Samoan poetess, journalist and dramatist, Faumuina Felolini Maria Tafuna’i, said that in this poem Ms. Aroga shows us how to avoid “the throng of environmental evangelism”.

This is a good poem.

We are one and the same

The secret to loving everything
Is to love just one thing

When I saw him it was on a pale eve
With the last of the light taking leave

And so I loved the sunset that revealed him to me
Along with the rain tree

That sheltered the park on the night
He looked may way and smiled at the sight

Of whatever it was that amused
Him enough to cast me a bemused

Smile but it’s while the wind makes golden waves of the honey duke fields on sultry noon’s
That I talk about him to the pale moon

Then I love the way nature responds in silent whispers
Like his voice: a hushed breeze that calms and the soul lingers

To love the forests we tread and the mountains we hiked
To wish no harm came to his coral reefs where we scuba dived

To love one thing
Is to love everything

Because in the sand is his footprints
And on the hilltops are the missing links

That pointed me home
To all the evergreen abodes he roamed

So in loving him and everything else was to love the flowers he cherished 
And the others about to diminish

To love the lands he traversed
was to want them protected and conserved

To say this is his history, this is his people, this is his heritage
Is to say these are all mine too and I am proud of the same privilege 

To call this part of the southern sky his and my home
And to want nothing more than for it to remain a pristine evergreen dome

Being one and the same 
Though bearing different names

His hands the coarse color of brown earth from which we were formed
My womb the birthplace of generations yet to be born

Our home a lush mass in an ocean of blue
I know not the difference between me and you.