Tuesday, February 04, 2025

DOWN-SIDE-UP AND BACK-ASSWARDS

by Jennifer M Phillips


Bali's Tanah Lot temple being sucked down a sinkhole: AI-generated graphic by Shutterstock for The New Verse News.



Jakarta (ANTARA) January 31, 2025 - Indonesia's special envoy for climate change and energy, Hashim Djojohadikusumo, said he considers the Paris Agreement no longer relevant for Indonesia following the US withdrawal from the deal. "If the United States does not want to comply with the international agreement, why should a country like Indonesia comply with it?" he asked at the ESG Sustainable Forum 2025 in Jakarta on Friday.


Today in the tabloids Indonesia is leaving Paris,
so many broken hearted occlusions
across the ways we fixed to meet.
Sports news has coined negative milestones.
I’m picturing
monuments earth sucks down like sinkholes
swallowing minivans. Drilling down
in our former refuge. Ignoring
acceleration
of ice-melt, diminishing aquifers, displaced bergs,
and this is just our warm-up act, witnessing
the double un-tundra.
Wondering if this might be the ending
of the beginning?


A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022), and Sailing To the Edges (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2025). Two of Phillips' poems were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection is Wrestling With the Angel (forthcoming, Wipf & Stock)