Beware Water Nixies

Beware Water Nixies

Freshwater beckons with its beauty
jade green waves
crowned with white caps
curl and break.
In the dark under the curl
nixies, currents, seiches,
spirit many away.
–Barbara Spring
From the book, Sophia’s Lost and Found: Poems of Above and Below

Singing Sands of West Michigan

The Singing Sands

The singing sands of West Michigan are so called because of their high levels of quartz. When a toe or shoe is dragged across wet sands a high pitched sound may be heard. These sands really do sing. Read more about the geology of the Great Lakes in my book The Dynamic Great Lakes available at Barnes & Noble and many other online book stores.

Broken Oil Pipeline Threatens Lake Michigan

Enbridge, a Canadian Oil company, is responsible for a broken oil pipeline that is gushing oil into the Kalamazoo River.  If the toxic oil reaches Lake Michigan 80 miles away, it would be a disaster of tremendous proportions for all living things in and around the water.  I am heartsick about this.

The Great Lakes support an array of life including the people who depend on it for drinking water and for domestic, industrial, recreational and agricultural uses. 

There is an unparalled sports fishery for salmon and other fishes. I hope the EPA can prevent the oil from reaching Lake Michigan.  These waters flow into Lake Huron, Lake St. Clair, Lake Erie, Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River.  It’s the greatest freshwater system on this planet.

Update:  The EPA stepped in to contain the spill before it reached Lake Michigan.  The oil spill has destroyed property along the Kalamazoo River, wildlife and marshes.  This should not have happened.

Pending Legislation

http://www.cleanwateraction.org/feature/countdown-ban-drilling-great-lakes

Update September 21, 2010. Looks like a pipeline is being proposed to go through the Straits of Mackinac. Enbridge again: http://michiganmessenger.com/42060/state-approves-work-on-oil-pipeline-under-mackinac-straits

The Buried Town of Singapore

 

poem excerpted from the book

 

 

The buried town of Singapore once hummed

with life, but now no more.

And what do the singing sands say

of streets and houses below the dunes?

Ask the west wind

the intimate wind may know.

Ask Lake Michigan’s waves

or the river that flows to the sweet water seas.

Go ask the wild rose.

* Singapore is now called Saugatuk