Two Poems on Air
Poet Diane Pacitti shares two poems that explore the hidden forces sustaining life on earth, drawing on the Jewish idea of the Tzadik Nistar—the unseen righteous ones whose presence keeps the world in balance, and our planet’s urgent, element response to its relentless exploitation.
A poem inspired by the Tzadik Nistar
The poem extract below is taken from a longer poem inspired by the Jewish tradition of the Tzadik Nistar: the concealed righteous ones. These are the 36 hidden people, renewed in each generation, whose humble and holy existence sustains the world. Their identities are unknown to each other, and each is unaware their own crucial role, but the belief is that if even one was missing, the world would come to an end.
I am fascinated by this idea. It made me wonder: who are the people who, like an invisible glue, hold the human and more-than-human world together? In the eighteenth century a leading rabbinical writer said that they might be wood-choppers or water-drawers. Perhaps now they might be carers, or small-scale ecological farmers, or an indigenous person faithfully resisting the desecration of the land they love.
If we turn to the more-than-human world, who would be our choice for the Tzadik Nistar? To even consider this makes us realise how inter-connected all earth-beings are, how to take away just one sets off chains of reactions which affect the whole earth. If we are naming ecological heroes, keystone species come to mind. Some, such as sea otters, elephants and wolves, are highly visible, but bees would be a good example. In my poem I write about ‘weeds’ that transform desecrated soil, and fungi, literally hidden below-ground. And I write about air.
Out of the four classical ‘elements’ of earth, water, air, air is the invisible member, a pre-condition for life that for most of human history has been taken for granted.
It is chilling that we are only just beginning to recognise the presence and significance of fungi, or the ozone layer, at the very moment we are destroying the biosphere which they sustain. Suddenly the Jewish mystic belief that the removal of just one member of the hidden holy ones will precipitate the end of the world sounds alarmingly relevant to the 21st century.
What do our eyes encounter all the time
and pass through?
What is closer than our skin
passing through our bodies;
yet also distant
and Invisible?
The same protector
Who With gravity
fastens the seas and rivers
to this earth;
the same shield
who envelopes us, who clings like an embrace
to preserve life-heat
to shield from harmful rays;
our eyes stopped at the clouds
the visible signs
or disappeared in an infinity of blue;
while, subtly layered, it was all around:
a vulnerable halo
we ignored:
then bored a hole
with a vomit of black smoke.
Diane Pacitti, 2025
Revolt of the Elements
My second poem was published in Fixing Earth: Africa, UK and Ireland Writers Anthology Vol. 2, edited by Tendai Mwanaka. The first verse focusses on air, but I am offering the whole poem because ecological breakdown in one part affects the whole earth, and language struggles to catch up.
Revolt of the Elements
The air is weary
of ghosting the human world. It is tired of hosting
a phantom-earth built out of factory-smut,
flaked skin and car-fart. It resents being used
as a human lavatory: this path of birds;
this wind-way of seeds. Now it twists and roars
in hurricanes. It hurls itself at impediments.
The water
doesn’t know its place any more. Its freedom-flow
is kettled into plastics, implicated
in death-camps which capture, starve and choke
its own offspring. It remembers the planet
as a womb of silent water. Fouled, thwarted,
its swelling body tears at the upstart land.
The words refuse
to work for us any more. We called these rocks
a coast, to pin down our nation-state:
now they are muddy flux. The caps of our globe
rage towards us as sea. Now names shrink back
to breath and spittle. Ancient presences
refuse to be nouns, and become verbs.
Diane Pacitti, 2025
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