President-elect Donald Trump said Sunday that “nobody really knows” whether climate change is real and that he is “studying” whether the United States should withdraw from the global warming agreement struck in Paris a year ago. —Washington Post, December 11, 2016
The feather star unfolds itself forward, frond
after frond, like an Escher stairway,
impossible, yet in perpetual motion, somewhere deep
off the coast of Thailand, unaware
that protection of its ocean has been handed
to the oil-hungry, who will crack
the sea floor until it oozes black, until such creatures
dance only as bright motes in memory,
those who love them too weak to halt the juggernauts
of greed and indifference.
Devon Balwit is a poet and educator from Portland, Oregon. She has a chapbook Forms Most Marvelous forthcoming from dancing girl press (summer 2017). Her recent poems have appeared in TheNewVerse.News before as well as in numerous print/on-line journals, among them: Oyez, Red Paint Hill, The Ekphrastic Review, The Cincinnati Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Timberline Review, Trailhead Magazine VCFA, The Prick of the Spindle, and Permafrost.