Another shitty day in Paradise (Calif.) after 2018 fires. (Noah Berger/AP via npr.org) someone once said if you want
to hide something, put it in a poem. maybe that will eliminate it, too -- a kind of un-sympathetic magic . . . if i can just pour all the climate chaos into a verse, i’ll kill it worth a try . . . 1990: 81% of world’s energy came from fossil fuels; 2020: 80% of world’s energy came from fossil fuels (drop b/c of pandemic); renewables offset by increasing demand in india, china, et al. amitav ghosh was right: asia will decide the fate of the world (prob. not in a poem) -- hopefully rather soon let’s sequester all our carbon in the poem; bury all your apocalyptic thinking, too; “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” sez a.o.c., well, now it’s in the poem, safely encased, like chicken little’s tomb (thought: what if the people bypassed the politicians & directly went after the corporations that hired them? . . . desperate times . . .) i guess i shd talk abt cyclone eloise, what it’s doing to mozambique: “at least” nine humans dead, 7,000 displaced, 1,000 homes destroyed, 4,800 totalled, 300k acres of crops ruined i shd talk about cotton growing farther north in kansas (!), armadillos marching farther up in missouri, all those percentages i shd mention how "there isn't a community in coastal america where we are not seeing some transition away from the coast and moving to higher ground,” as the architecture researcher sez; “risk from flood shaping property values,” etc. that is if you can afford to move -- or if you can’t afford not to, like the 2019 “caravan” of humans, marching from dried out farms south of the border to here ok — it’s a start, right? our goal? full poetic containment of the climate crisis by 2035. mmm, come to think of it, make that 2050. or maybe 2075? well, some time before it’s too late, anyhow
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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. |