Each week, Steve Heins has been sending The Crude Life another Poem in honor of National Poetry Month.
Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, National Poetry Month reminds the public that poets have an integral role to play in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K–12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and—of course—poets, marking poetry’s important place in our lives.
Thanks in part to our Poetry Month partners and sponsors, The Crude Life is able to offer activities, initiatives, and resources so that people can join the celebration. U.S. National Poetry Month, April, is a marvelous opportunity to celebrate the expressiveness, delight, and pure charm of poetry. It is a special occasion that reminds us of the integral role of poets and poetry in our cultures.
One of The Crude Life’s regular guest is Stephen Heins, who has been known as the “ESG Doubting Thomas” since 2019. Proir to his ESG skepticism, he was beating drums with beatniks at Columbia in New York State and assisting the telecommunications industry with the largest merger in United States history.
Today The Crude Life honors and celebrates Stephen Heins for his creative work and endeavors in and out of the energy industry.
Six Foot Night in Late August
A seven-thirty sky
in late August
where night too close
and moon too early
Iowa cornfields
blow up
to shoreline
of road
like high tide
of unharvested sea
High roads of high plains
have run down
into flatter fields
bottomed out black
Iowa’s high topped
cornfields are high
walls of darkness
Their tassels and stalk-tops
are graveside flowers
above six foot night
in late August
By Steve Heins
ESG Roars over America
The moon still hangs
over Lake Michigan and
the nor’easter winds still
…make oceanic waves roar.
For the first time
in 8 years, let us
allow all of voting
America have a seat
at the energy roundtable
In terms of point
…and counter-point,
let us have a full throated
discussion about ESG
and America….
The world’s future.
Certainty and moral rectitude…
are not welcomed at table.
Steve Heins, 2021
Skinny Days, Skinnier Nights
Lonely, one night I watched
a program,
Or should I say
a pogrom?
A cheery little story
about liberating
The concentration camps of Europe.
Images of life on a thread:
Jews and other outcasts clinging
To the belief. What was it?
Love and God…Mankind
That ultimate oxymoron.
The four F’s, friends, family, faith, freedom?
Or, the primitive beast of survival.
I imagine it was all of these reasons.
Looking at the gaunt shadows of suffering
And vacant eyes of both the living
And the dead, I know
I will know some of the pain and loneliness.
Living without, living with,
I wonder which is worse,
Still knowing these are complete.
Only an emaciated self remains
Living through the onanism of one’s
Skinny days and skinnier nights.
Long after that night, I
stand before my mirror
And see the same visage
And bony body of a soul.
Who has lost and still found
A simple belief: the skinniest
Day or night may be
My last chance
…tomorrow.
– Steve Heins, 1992
Untitled
Life reveals dark secret
of the ideological environmental
movement.
The movement imposes
the views of mostly
wealthy, comfortable
Americans and Europeans
on mostly poor,
desperate Africans,
Asians and Latin Americans.
It violates these people’s
most basic human rights,
denying them better economic,
female education and rights,
the chance for better lives,
the right to rid their countries
of diseases like malaria
that were vanquished
long ago in Europe
and the United States.
…Oh, the Humanity!
– Steve Heins
Myth Enough
For days, moon and Venus
dominate the night-time sky.
We traveled from Colorado’s
Sangre de Christo mountains
To Manhattan’s man-made
foothills…
2,300 miles in all.
And Venus remained first star,
bright star for the wishing.
Tonight, the vines of Tennessee
drape like royal trains
of green majesty.
From darker forests
beneath a full moon
shines the fog silver
above vine-hidden trees
and dark shadows
of Great Smoky Mountains.
We drive silver,
slippery Interstate.
Paved with enough myth
for another year.
Steve Heins, 1978
(Steve Heins published this tribute to his Mother 3 years ago.)
On July 4, 1921, Gladys Lucille Harmon (Heins) was born in Lamar, Colorado. She would have been 100.
She was a sweet soul, forged in the turmoil and disruption of the Dust Bowl, Depression, WW 2, and reuniting with her husband after two years of total war silence.
We lost her 46 years ago this year.
She was a great mother, who would move mountains for her son when he was a boy in Gillett and Oshkosh, WI.
She had a sweetness and generosity about her, but she was also a firecracker befitting her birthday.
For Gladys Lucille Harmon Heins (July 4, 1921 – March 6, 1976)
When talking about death
You said you wanted to be cremated.
Neither religion or dying would be
The escape your ashes offered.
Was a grave stone’s solace too permanent
A shout of your name?
The cemetery just too stationary
For a firecracker like you?
Or, was the seduction of the Rockies
And its towering vistas too great?
These thoughts stand before me
Like these airport buildings
Shimmering in a crazy dance of jet fumes.
I received the dreaded late night call
Sister sobbing the news
And now I travel to Oklahoma City
To join your cremators.
You were born on Independence Day,
July 4, 1921, with a great, great Cherokee grandmother
Said to be a part of your heritage.
Your parents were from Kansas, so flat fields
Here in southeastern Colorado must have given them comfort.
You told me that as a young girl
You thought the town of Lamar
(some five hundred frontier souls)
Celebrated your birthday: Climbing
High into the trees, you
Spent your tomboy days watching
The red, white and blue fireworks of July.
Outside the airplane window,
I see vague images of your life remembered,
Then I notice two jet vapor trails
Suspended next to each other
In the pale blue March sky.
Inside the plane, marble mouthed children
practice for a life of words,
A woman bends to knit a red sweater,
Businesssmen whisper secrets back and forth.
“Mother, I repeat a promise I made to you:
You will join the clouds gathering in the foothills
Where you can see hundreds of miles
Of the Rocky Mountain peaks and prairies.
This will be your burial ground.”
Looking every bit a full blooded Cherokee,
I remember your face in the casket
As I toss your ashes into the mountain winds.
Now, you are beyond the scattering of your
Last Independence day.
Steve Heins, 1980
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