were i clever, canny, practical, & smart
(which admittedly i am not), i wld do stuff like leading nature walks so both i and others cld enjoy what's left of the more-than-human world before it's gone – stuff that wld look good on a resume, too – w/o i mean talking about the “gone” part look kids – a hungry caterpillar – now go write a poem more fun than going to protests or meetings in deadeningly drab rooms; more salubrious than chronicling things most healthy people avoid thinking about but i’m me in this my only life inculcated as i was w/a definite sense of “right” & “wrong” (even nietzsche cldn’t set me straight), raised in a family that cldn’t not think about power, politics, & c. so here i go again, here i can’t help but notice: how venice’s right-wing council (the “league” + the “brothers of italy” + the “forza italia”) re- jected plans for reducing pollution, & “moments” thereafter their chamber flooded (it’s not nice to fool mother nature); more floods today, state of emerg.; smashed gondolas, idled vaporetti; “la serenissima”: blithely flaunting its artistic artificiality across a real live lagoon, w/ real sinking islands underneath; & britain starting to look like venice, on track for wettest nov. since 1852; elsewhere, drier: sydney’s reservoirs less than ½ full; 3x more wildfires this year than all of last, lapping at city’s outskirts; & out in california (& if you don’t live in california, aren’t you sick of hearing about california? you have problems of your own, right?), pacific gas & electric owes $30 b (that’s b with a “b”) in liability; “but most experts agree: even under the best scenarios, the fires & wide- spread power shutoffs will be here for years to come & californians will pay higher prices for less reliable energy.” . . . well, ok . . . that’s pretty bad & in the rest of the ironically- named united states, 400 cold temp records broke this week, including all-time nov. records (global warming schmarming!), but 2x as many record hi’s as lo’s throughout the 2010s; & “almost impossible” for car dealerships to get insurance: hailstorms getting so frequent, esp. across the “hail belt” (yes, there is: colo., neb., kansas, okla., texas); & “even an outbreak of plague in china has been attributed to climate change this week”: drought- caused explosion of rodent pop., apparently (don’t ask me); (we’re telescoping it all so you can see w/a wide-angle lens) & it’s 32 in anchorage, 31 here: in fact, assume that everything i have mentioned before is still going on: flooding in somalia, water shortages in southern africa, disease in wake of typhoons in mozambique, bahamas: these things don’t have an end date – all of it affecting children worst (don’t worry, all of that is a long, long way away & mummy & daddy won’t let it hurt you) well, now that’s over – i can go rehydrate & maybe look at the birds before i get back to work
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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. |