Snyder's Poems

            I had a very simple method of picking my poems. I started fairly close to the back of Turtle Island and flipped pages until finding a poem that I liked.

            Starting with “For the Children”, this poem is about how the human race is destroying the world more and more as we look for solutions on how fix what we have done. Mountains move in front of people as they continue to go down. Snyder mentions that people say that we will reach a place in the future where environmental problems won’t be a concern anymore, but we have to work to get there. He tells people to tell their children to “go light” and not destroy the world anymore in the process of trying to achieve salvation.

            “Dusty Braces” is about the men of a time before Snyder. These men were hard working, but they worked in environment destroying jobs. They were miners or railroad builders who destroyed land to make their honest mans’ pay. Snyder resents them for this. He calls them “bastards” because of what they have done to the planet while he has been a “tree hearted son” to these men and the earth.

            The poem “LMFBR” is about the monster destroying the world: industry. The “Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor” is the name of this monster. It is behind industry and is described as having plutonium teeth. Snyder moves to talk about all the products that the LMFBR creates and how these products don’t just dissipate away, but stick with us. He refers to all that is happening because of industry as the “Kālī Yūga”, a final phase of destruction in an Indian spiritual belief system. This phase is marked by death, destruction, and demoralization of man and his spirituality. The products of the LMFBR only bring the yūga more power.

            “Affluence” is the final poem on my list for the time being. This poem is about forestry before Snyder’s time and about what people are having to do because of older forestry practices. Snyder describes how before, a logger would cut down trees and then just leave the land how it was. This makes it extremely difficult for anything to grow back because all of the space is taken up by dead tree trunks. A more modern forestry technique is the slash and burn technique in which trees are cut down and the trunks are burned so that the ashes provide nutrients for the coming saplings. This cost the older logger money that he didn’t want to spend, but now people are paying for something that should have been done long ago.