"And What if I Spoke of Despair?" is a short poem about a lifetime of loving the Earth, despair over the state of the natural environment and the hope that the globe can be loved appropriately.

The poem begins with the question asked in the title, "And what if I spoke of despair?" and then validates that every person feels despair at some point. Every person can feel hopelessness running inside himself as if it is blood coursing through veins. Although the feeling of despair is a universal one, the actual source of the despair is very personal.

Normally, beauty prompts the hopeless feeling and brings the resulting ennui forward. For the author, that beauty arrives in the form of nature's evolutions, such as the rain puddling on a fallen leaf, fall foliage or a September moon which demands that a person stop driving, pull...