by Dawid Juraszek
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| Countries’ climate pledges built on flawed data, Post investigation finds. Photo: A large plantation of palm trees, which produce palm oil, borders an undrained peat forest in Simunjan in the Sarawak region of Malaysia. When peat-rich bogs are drained and converted to farmlands, they release a rapid pulse of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as the once-waterlogged plants’ remains degrade with the sudden exposure to air. —The Washington Post, November 7, 2021 |
The ways the wise ones of our pasts
warred on the bodies of the land
all the while
crafting key words and ideas
for you and me
to grow up with
shaped and scarred us for life
Mountainsides stripped bare
underneath the blazing Sun
is not how it always was
a side effect of wanting more
shrugged off
or sorrowed over
then accepted and assimilated
A shortcut to wisdom
when exploring a narrative
what & who & why & how
hindsight is best
not indulged
as belated foresight
everything so very clear all along
Words and ideas now being crafted
justify unjustifiable
with solutions that could truly impress
only in hindsight
premised on there being a future
to look back on this moment
and give us a thumbs up
Dawid Juraszek is the author of Medea and Other Poems of the Anthropocene (Kelsay Books 2020). A bilingual writer and educator based in China, he is working on a PhD project in cognitive ecocriticism at Maastricht University. His fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in multiple venues in Poland, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand.