You Can Never Speak Up Too Often for the Love of All Thing

You can never speak up too often for the love of all things.
For every living thing or natural place on earth, there is someone
who wants to kill or destroy it;
Therefore, you can never speak up too often for the love of all things.

These families of geese that I watch as I sit beside the pond,
Two pairs, four adults, with their clutches of downy goslings
who are carefully sheltered between the
tall-necked, attendant goose and gander,

There is a hunter who yearns to kill them,
Who feels entitled to his killing of them,
Who would be outraged if you implied he had no right to
gun them down in season.

This pond, set like an opal in the precious ring of earth,
wind sparkling among shaded forests of hemlock and pine,
There is someone waiting to race his motorboat across it,
knifing the soft skin of its silence,
leaking oil into its pearl waters;
develop it, build beaches,
bring in crowds with boomboxes surging across
macadamized parking lots;

Therefore, you can never speak up too often for the love of all things.

By Paul R. Fleischman, M.D.