With no advance warning
the San Antonio National Weather Service
had already been reduced to rubble
missing meteorologist, hydrologist,
staff forecaster.
Frantic parents pray for their children
caught off guard by the flooding
Guadalupe. No more have been found alive
clinging to trees.
The governor signs a declaration.
The search and rescue in Central Texas
will continue looking.
In this state while water spills over
the banks of rivers in another
water’s gone missing. The Great
Salt Lake is starved to death.
Protestors speak like sybils, prophets, seers.
And still the senators, the governor claim
climate change a hoax.They can’t see
through their frozen hearts the melting ice,
can’t smell the noxious gases, admit what
this means for our survival.
It costs them nothing to offer their prayers
We all feel haunted like Hamlet did
in Elsinore. Perfumes can’t cover over
the smell of what’s rotten—a shriveled lake
with its dead fish, a bloated river where children
float downstream like Ophelia.
Karen Marker is an Oakland, CA. poet activist who has committed to writing a poem a day of protest and hope in response to current events. Her first poetry book Beneath the Blue Umbrella came out recently with Finishing Line Press and explores family mental illness, stigma and healing.
