Sloop Clearwater (what one person started)

( Pete Seeger )

On the Hudson River, New York
the graceful silhouette
of a familiar sloop
passes onlookers who recall
a time when the river was filled

with waste and toxic runoff,
when nothing
and no one was safe
in or near its sluggish water
filled with
trash and human feces.

Pete Seeger, folk singer,
activist,
who watched the Hudson
peacefully flow by
for hours
atop his Beacon home
he and his wife Toshi built.

Kneeling on the shore,
one day, Pete put his hand
in the pulse
of the river current
and knew their friend
was very ill, unable to speak.

He could not tolerate
what had been
happening years, any longer,
and that he would dedicate
himself to saving the river.

Fifty years later from when the
craft first sailed the Hudson,
the sleek wood sloop drifts
downstream.

The crew is made up of students,
learning about conservation,
that hoist her mainsail on this
gray, rainy, spring morning.

The gulls are flying inland,
the tide seems uncertain
as the day becomes
an afterthought
as to what may follow, with
the unstable air in its vacuum,
his voice is risen...

*Where have all the flowers gone
gone to graveyards every one
when will they ever learn
a time to be born
a time to die
a time to heal
I swear it’s not too late




*Lyrics from “Where Have All The Flowers Gone”, and “Turn! Turn! Turn!”