Poetry for Our Planet

Hearing a poem read by the poet who wrote it can be transforming. We listen, digest the words,  each line having its own unique weight.

There were several weighty lines reflecting the impacts of climate change on all living things at “Poetry for Our Planet” – an event during Climate Week NYC 2026 held on Sept. 15 at the Museum of Natural History. The three very distinguished poets who shared their words were award-winning poet and, essayist Jane Hirshfield, award winning and author of numerous poetry books Kimiko Hahn, and Brandon Kilbourne winner of the 2025 Cave Canem Prize and who is featured in the Museum’s exhibition Black in Natural History Museums. Their poems exemplified how artistic expression can create a shared realm that connects everyone.

The evening opened with welcome remarks by Museum President Sean Decatur who spoke of the importance of bringing the concepts of poetry and climate together in one place.

“The data tells us about the impact of carbon levels in the atmosphere,” Decatur told the 200 people who filled Kaufmann Theater. “And how that translates into a broader impact on our climate, on lives of people and has shattered habitats has shifted patterns of plants and animals and Changing the trajectory of our planet.”

Miranda Massie, director of the Climate Museum  said “There’s a beautiful sense of community in this room, that is the magic of people coming together around the truth, around a project of beauty and the arts and in the halls of this incredible institution.

Starting off the reading was Brandon Kilbourn who said his poem

The Last Sea Cow’s Testimony,  is about the Steller’s sea cow was first encountered by Europeans in 1741 after the shipwreck of the St. Peter on Bering Island during the Great Northern Expedition and within 27 years of its first contact with Europeans, the sea cow was hunted to extinction. Kilbourn, with his deep resonant voice, started reading the first lines of the poem:

Fittingly, the first of them arrived

in disaster, as, like a whirlpool,

only disaster spirals about them—

Kimiko Hahn explained how many of her writing prompts come from science “which overwhelms me” and how “poetry is always in the house of science.”

Her poem Pinguinus Impennis details the brutal history of how the large, flightless birds were relentlessly hunted. The first lines of the poem are:

Large, flightless, and defenseless,
the great auk was captured
for feathers for featherbeds—
hunters loosening the plumage in cauldrons
fueled with the oil
from the freshly killed auks before them.

Jane Hirshfield said her poems point towards the urgency that “has brought us all together.” She told of how in the early days of the first Trump administration in 2017, the White House took down all climate change information from their website and restricted federal environmental and scientific communication.

“They instructed all the scientists who work for the federal agencies not to speak of their work to the public without having it first approved the political heads of their agencies. I took this deeply personally because many of my closest friends are research scientists.

She read “On the Fifth Day,” the same very powerful poem she read at the 2017 March For Science in Washington DC, attended by about 40-50,000 people. Here are the first lines.

On the Fifth Day

the scientists who studied the rivers

were forbidden to speak

or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air

were told not to speak of the air,

and the ones who worked for the farmers

were silenced,

and the ones who worked for the bees.

From left: Miranda Massie, Brandon Kilbourne, Ana Luz Porzecanski Kimiko Hahn and Jane Hirshfield on the panel at the Poetry for our Planet event on Sept. 15, 2026

A panel conversation on the growing importance verse has in creating community included all three poets and  scientist Ana Luz Porzecanski, director of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation at the Museum . Porzecanski explained that the center is involved with interdisciplinary research. “We combine and integrate multiple strands of knowledge.”

After the panel discussion , a guided poem-writing exercise was facilitated by David Hassler, executive director of the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. Many in the audience read their poems aloud and were enthusiastically applauded.

This program was presented by the Gottesman Research Library and Learning Center in collaboration with Climate Museum and the Wick Poetry Center’s Poets for Science initiative at Kent State University.