CARBON THOUGHTS

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

Above the broad green expanse of the marsh
Dozens of swifts
Dart and veer and cavort with anarchic abandon
Like a corps de ballet gone slightly unhinged.
Red-shouldered piccolo birds
Ornament the air
With the bright clear notes of their piping
And a lone egret lopes past a pond
Just above the water.
Here on land
Countless pill bugs
Full of purpose and gravitas
Hump back and forth across the trail
Like law clerks bearing weighty briefs to court
While box elder bugs keep backing into each other
For anonymous sex.
The rumor making its way
Among the long bright green grasses
The clovers and the tiny pimpernels
Is that the massive winter storms
Inundating us this year
With triple the normal precipitation
Likely a result of human-caused climate change
Are at last headed out of town
And the spring weather that's on its way
Is certain to stick around for a while.
So we join with the birds and the bugs
In welcoming the new season
And calling for the carbon grubbing
Glassy-eyed lucre-addicted climate manglers
To rejoin life's great extended family
And keep the oil in the ground.


Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesdayand others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.

THREE EGRETS

by Buff Whitman-Bradley

As we stand outside the bank
Holding signs
To protest profiteering
From the ravaging of our environment
Three egrets fly past just above us
And over the maniacal traffic
Of the freeway
Heading to a small marshy area
By the frontage road on the other side.
Three egrets that remind us in this moment
Of our immutable interdependence –
Animal plant stone
Earth water air.
Three egrets
Whose cells, like our own, thrum
With the ancient music of all that is.
Three egrets that know nothing
About carbon emissions and methane plumes
About melting glaciers and dying oceans.
Three egrets that know nothing
About parts per million and tipping points
And the dire predictions
Of climate scientists.
Three egrets that know nothing
About mass mobilizations
To resist the slashers and gougers and despoilers
Nothing about blockades and lock downs
And urgent uproarious disobedience
To disrupt business as usual –
But that is not the egrets' work,
It is ours.

Buff Whitman-Bradley's poetry has appeared in many print and online journals, including Atlanta Review, Bryant Literary Review, Concho River Review, Crannog, december, Hawai'i Review, Pinyon, Rockhurst Review, Solstice, Third Wednesdayand others. He has published several collections of poems, most recently, To Get Our Bearings in this Wheeling World. His interviews with soldiers who refused to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan became the book About Face: Military Resisters Turn Against War. He lives in northern California with his wife Cynthia.