As a genocide in the Middle East rages on, hurricanes wipe out entire towns, and the planet continues to reach boiling temperatures, Rosa De Anda said she was “willing to try anything” to unite people to pray for “balance.”

“Our planet is dying, so desperately dying, and so we are at it at an urgent moment,” the 69-year-old Mexican artist and founder of the Marigold Project said. 

These circumstances led the Marigold Project team to host the third annual Poet’s Murmuration at San Francisco’s Exploratorium Museum on Oct. 24, a few days before Dia de los Muertos, a Mexican Indigenous holiday honoring the symbiotic relationship between life and death. 

A murmuration is the sound of one or more people talking quietly. De Anda said she wanted to emulate this noise to “intensify” the prayer for Earth’s rebalance. 

“The way this came to me was, I was brought up a Catholic. I went to Mass every Sunday. When everybody prayed, everybody prayed with different voices,” De Anda said. “Let’s say that ‘Our father’ started, then other people started it just slightly at a different point. And so it just became a murmuration of the ‘Our Father’ and that thought, that kind of elevated group prayer, stuck.”

Community members and poets gathered in a circle inside of San Francisco’s Exploratorium Museum on Oct. 24, 2024.

Photo: Jacqueline Cardenas

Flowers arranged at the center of one of the Exploratorium Museum’s galleries.

Photo: Jacqueline Cardenas

Around 300 people attended the murmuration, and 75 poets were tasked with reciting a poem about any of the five elements: earth, fire, air, water, or love.

Danielle Revives, an altarist and The Marigold Project’s RAICES Fellow, said the goal of the murmuration was to remind people of the element’s importance. 

“I hope people not only find the whirl of words beautiful and interesting and captivating, but they are inspired to be like, ‘Oh, maybe we should care about the Earth. Maybe we should think about the most valuable resource in which a lot of the world does not have access to: water,” Revives said. 

Poetry also has the ability to “encompass every feeling that you can have as a human,” Revives added. “Poetry is something that can stand the test of time. It is something that can be published. It is something that can be recorded. It is something that can be sung. It is something that can be felt. 

Esperanza Cabrales, a 24-year-old Chicanx artist with Bay Area Creative, was among the people who recited a poem about water, though she connected it to Mother Nature’s ocean. 

Right before Cabrales stepped up to the mic, Christine Joy, one of the “goddess” dancers facilitating the murmuration, played the ocean drum, a percussion instrument that creates sounds similar to rolling ocean waves. 

“We’ve forgotten that the sea screams,” Cabrales read aloud to a crowd of people. 

Esperanza Cabrales, 24, recited a poem inspired by the ocean at the 3rd annual Poet’s Murmuration.

Photo: Jacqueline Cardenas

After the murmuration, Cabrales reflected on how she felt hearing the ocean drum, telling Latino News Network that it “really added to my ability to … channel the rhythm that I was hoping to channel.”

It was Cabrales’ first time performing at the Exploratorium, though she said her perception of death had especially “taken on a new meaning” after leaving the Catholic church. 

“Before, there was a lot of fear involved with it. Now I think of it in terms of, like, it’s gonna sound weird, but I’ve taken science and made it spiritual,” she said, referencing the law of conservation of energy, which proves energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be transformed from one state to another. 

“We have all existed in equal measure, in some way or another, and the memories of our loved ones still exist within the world because they exist within us,” she said. 

Cabrales’s uncle passed away when she was 15, though his experience working as a florist is one that continues to live through her, she said. 

“I think of him whenever I see flowers, whenever I work with flowers. there is death in my hands as we speak,” Cabrales said, holding onto fluorescent orange marigolds. 

Rosa De Anda said she hoped every attendee had a “spiritual experience” regardless of their religion. 

“I just want them to take away that they are valuable, that we are all special,” De Anda said. “That the power is in the love, because even in science, if there’s no attraction, if there’s no love, nothing happens.”