Alpha and Omega

John Reibetanz reminds us why P. K. Page’s glosa “Planet Earth” remains one of her most popular poems around the world:

It addresses so definitively two of the most pressing needs of our age: to put ourselves into meaningful and productive dialogue with each other, rather than unreeling our competing monologues, and to try to establish a caring relationship with our environment before it is too late. The poem pursues each of these goals with all its heart, and by the time we reach its last line we realize that both ends involve the same experience: so intense a recognition and realization of otherness as to merit the word that occurs seven times, a word present in the first sentence and the last, the poem’s alpha and omega: love.