It’s taken me half a lifetime to even learn enough to start to appreciate her wisdom.

I might not have lived enough to appreciate it, how do I do so?

Try not to die anytime soon!

If you're being serious, it's more that within time you begin to realize both your fragility and lack of power over yourself and nature. And on top of that you realize the narrow perspectives you held as a child that came for your culture, like owning things or believing you have control over them, are far less real than we think. Here she points out, look, you can say you own something, but that's a cultural concept. Long after you are dead and gone that land will be there, you will not. Long after you said you can control nature, it will consume you in the grave. You are a part of it, and for a time you can exert some power over it, but in the long term, we are just waiting to be overrun by it. What may appear inferior, could, over a long time horizon, prove superior. Trees for example have survived 100's of millions of years, and humans are a mere 10's of thousands. We are young, ambitious and naive and we are cutting them down -- the thing that provides the very air we breath.

Its a broader perspective that come with age I'm guessing.

Your account profile appears to claim " This account is no longer active in protest of Hacker News censorship."

Did you forget to update it?

"You" in a geological and time sense are almost nothing.

Fill the room your in with dead-body clones of yourself, it will probably take well over a hundred.

Collect all the humans on the surface of the Earth, they'd all fit inside Rohde Island (thanks XKCD). Humanity is a tiny fraction of the mass and surface area of the world.

You've been alive for less than 100 years and only seen, heard, touched or felt the smallest fraction of the surface of the Earth. Met a tiny fraction of the people.

Time wise you're limited to 80? years of cognizant thought. Maybe 90? Humans have been around for thousands of years, and earth has been around for billions.

Yet, we as humans claim parts of nature as our own. My land, my country, my trees, my pet rock. All those things aren't yours and never were.

The poem just imagines what would happen if nature suddenly decided to reclaim what was always hers.

Shout out to Ballard's The Drowned World, a post-ecopocalypse story where the main character undergoes a (perceived) reconnection with larger biophysics, "neuronic time.

I feel like having Atwood, Ballard & Curtis in a thread deserves some kind of commendation.