GAIAN LAMENT

 by Catherine Gonick

Source: The Washington Post

            after the hypotheses of James Lovelock

 

The world is broken, the body of the single, gigantic animal

we have become is breaking, we don’t have much time.

The ancient organs and elements hold—

earth is still surface, water deeps, fire burns

in the center, and black space is encircled

by a ribbon of air—but it’s all sick

with wildfire fever, the atmosphere fills

with phlegm, the oceans with pharma,

indigestible soil starves and infects

flora and fauna, both wild and domestic,

our hearts ache, livers swell, lungs become fibrotic,

oxygen fails. Our science was too romantic,

our technology too rude. We looked out

as far as we were able but forgot

the unexpected we couldn’t measure.

The earth would do just fine without us,

and the other animals won’t care, unless perhaps

our dogs. Some of us always knew

we’d end badly, at the end of some endless

kalpa, the death of the last of five suns

carried by snakes of fire. But we expected

a respectable cosmic decline, not this mess

we designed. And yes, science has been

a disappointment. Who wanted to know

the limits of our filtering senses? How much further

we’d have to take our tools, if we can? Intelligence

would be better if purely artificial. Upright posture

and hands made us always want to leave home.

 

Catherine Gonick’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly,  Lightwood, Forge, Sukoon, and PoetsArtists, and in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, and forthcoming, Poemas Antivirus. She was awarded the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the National Ten-Minute Play Contest with the Actors Theatre of Louisville. She is part of a company that fights the effects of climate change.

VILLANGHAZALLE WITH FAUNA

by Esther Greenleaf Murer

    Do not sink gently into fathomless grief
    at brilliancy of colors bleached to white;
    rage, rage against the dying of the coral reef.
 
elkhorn, staghorn, pineapple, red cauliflower, mushroom, precious red, blue, organpipe, star, brain, torch, cup, sun, bubble, cactus, column, finger, flowerpot, pillar, table, tube, stone, fire

    Before we've even plumbed the trove of life
    that shelters there, prey to manmade blight,
    we rampage, rampage, killing off the coral reef.

purple stovepipe sponge, striped cleaner wrasse, batwing coral crab, slipper sea cucumber, tomato clownfish, yellow nudibranch, magnificent feather duster, nurse shark, marine iguana

    At last we claim the ocean as our fief;
    ours is the absolute, God-given right
    to wage, wage war against the coral reef.

blue spotted sting ray, saddleback butterflyfish, sea whip, chambered nautilus, variable boring sponge, regal tang, purple sea urchin, olive ridley sea turtle, acropora crab, sharpnosed puffer

    When Gaia bore us, she produced a thief
    who, armed with outsize trawls and dynamite,
    would stage, stage the dying of the coral reef.

harlequin shrimp, reticulate brittle star, somber sweetlips, blue-ringed octopus, loggerhead turtle, minifin parrotfish, brown volcano carpet sponge, orange fireworm, flamingo tongue cowrie

    our legacies (and may our time be brief)
    of plastic scum and seas acidified
    presage, presage the dying of the coral reef.

deceiver fangblenny, chicken liver sponge, Christmas tree worm, yellow-bellied sea snake, zebra shark, flying gurnard, sunflower starfish, leafy sea dragon, spiny lobster, zooxanthellae

    The news continues dire, with no relief,
    no end to blind rapacity in sight.
    Do not sink gently into fathomless grief
    but rage, rage against the killing of the coral reef.


Esther Greenleaf Murer is a relic of the 20th century.  She was brought up on Thornton Burgess's Seashore Book for Children and has a lifelong interest in invertebrate paleontology. 

WE LAY WASTE

by Ruth Maassen

“We are the asteroid now.” --Elizabeth Kolbert

We tell ourselves the tale of Gaia, a budding girl
with flowers in her hair, in mortal peril, and nod
and sigh and turn away. Oh, well. What’s on TV?
If we bleach out the richness of what remains
we needn’t know what our every breath endangers.

We can’t see what’s gone when it’s not there.
Species drain away unmourned. Forests shrink.
If the biosphere dies and no one is left to grieve,
will it matter? No one weeps for the dodo.
No one from our galaxy will weep for us.

Blessedly the stars are far out of our reach.
Our incessant observations do no harm.
Stars are impervious to myth and sky-sketched
constellations, they never know our eye-I-eye-I-eye.
Their atoms go on fusing in the far-off long-ago.

Why does the pelting rain not penetrate our skin?
Why is the wind no more than a mass of air moving,
not malevolent, not malign, however it buffets
the thin walls of the house and drifts the snow?
Why does it not burst open the prison cell of self?

Oh, for a sea serpent to surge onto the beach
and grapple us to our doom, like Laocoön.
Oh, for rough music to leak from the crevasse
where ancient gods live on in granite. Sing on,
old ones, before the music goes silent forever.


Ruth Maassen is the poet laureate of the small seaside town, Rockport, Massachusetts.