Listen to the light wind

Author's note: In this collage piece, I take fragments from these canonical poems that deal with nature and/or silence to create my own work:

Silent Friend of Many Distances, Feel by Rainer Maria Rilke
Keeping Quiet by Pablo Neruda
Silence by Edgar Allan Poe
Sleeping in the Forest by Mary Oliver
The Summer Day by Mary Oliver
From the Garden by Anne Sexton
To Autumn by John Keats

The voice and central theme of the poem is that of a sentient Nature, wounded by humans’ actions such as global warming, habitat destruction and exploitation of natural resources, who seeks to reconnect with the Earth to reclaim and eradicate the artificial silence that humans are imposing upon her. The backdrop features a Belladonna, a flower that symbolises silence and death. Since nature and flowers are in a never-ending cycle of life, death and rebirth, I thought I would locate my piece in a moment of final warning, that unfortunately resonates with today’s environmental crises.