by Steven Croft
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| Illustration from The Guardian, October 23, 2021 |
As the beehive of news stories grew,
scientists reporting back from Greenland's
shrinking ice sheet, coral reefs in Australia, the Florida Keys,
the feedback loops of forests lost and wildfire,
a beehive building like the global sauna our
drowsy governments offer an impossible treaty to slake,
suddenly a question rose before me:
why are we losing our grip on our world's biggest problem?
Because it is too far gone to hold?
Because floodwater and crabgrass want our cities?
Miners complain about the earth's heat
as they dig lower for coal to send to the surface.
Metaphor become metamorphosis.
Today, I can't look at a dome of beautiful October sky
without my mind's eye seeing a blue-lit jail
for a fevered planet, without my mind's ear hearing
buffalo herds of wind speaking in tongues
of shrieks across this doomed green land.
Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, The New Verse News, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.