morning sun lights up
spring-green leaves, fills tulips, ignites redbuds; brown thrasher belts out song; temperate, almost normal, air -- why do i do this to myself? why recite the woes of far-off lands? anything is better than grading papers plus which, maybe i don’t know what else to do. i mean, do people not know what’s going on? why isn’t everybody freaking out? why isn't everybody in the streets? if they haven’t & aren't, they probably won’t the b.b.c. guy sez the people living in the slums of dhaka live there b/c their farmland dis- appeared — eroded, salted, or drowned (an arable area the size of manhattan lost every year). do they know about “climate change”? no. they just know nature changed, is not the way it used to be now they must find a way to survive. but the emergency hasn't fully descended upon me, not yet — & when it does, i — we? — will find a way to survive, or not. simple as that. i don’t want to die. i just often don’t want to live & be awake at the same time. we? what? so i try to weave scroll into gold, translate the hints about the omens, take fragments of everything we don’t want to know & cobble them into verse: a desire for order so trans- parent it always teeters of the edge of dissolve as econo-politico “winners” keep us “losers” busier & busier w/ what’s in front of our faces: more papers to grade, customers served, reports to fill out triplicately, kids to feed, cars to fix, poetry books to publish, crops to plant (hopefully), bosses who need appeasing yesterday, all living that condition of universal competition, living what’s left of life in our own bubble or hovel w/no idea how to make this poem end (highest maximum minimum april temp ever in the s. hemisphere, yesterday) p.s.: if you’ve figured it out & you find this note in a bottle that's not in a bottle, say something back
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |