11 Climate change poems

fire season used to be a season now it's most of the year in some places the word season implies it ends i'm not sure that's still accurate

The toxic sites are not in the wealthy neighborhoods they never have been the climate crisis lands hardest on the people who did the least to cause it this is not a coincidence this is a pattern with a name

who somehow have found a sip of water, on this day in the past four syndicated series involving communication with the dead were televised and in this way we resembled our own ghosts in a world made brief with flowers. To you, our agonies and tizzies must appear quaint as the stiff shoulders of someone carrying buckets from a well or the stung beekeeper

It is so goddamn hot in our country that blooms —jacarandas, bougainvilleas, flamboyants— erupt in a shock of fuchsia from pipes laced with rust. Hokoyo! Step too close and your skin will crisp up like a chicken in hot Olivine. Everyone will see the fat sizzling from your innards. It is so hot that locusts drop in pools around your feet, their musical legs all melted. In our nation a waterfall is a cauldron of steaming falsehoods. S m o k e    t h u n d e r s … Maize simply withers in the miserly shade of thorns. Men quiver at cock’s crow and hang their cattle out to dry. Pumpkins turn to gourds. Midnight flushes out hunger. Ngozi dart in disregard across the oozing tar. Ach man, spare us your sermons concerning our weeknight brews: the problem we are facing now is the drunkard who drains his own water pot, leaving the mother of his children with one thing only: pure grit. Rhinos are shrinking Filthy crawfish bloat. Our grandmother is just seated as if death were a bus running late. We have now reached the stage where lackeys are openly trafficking dragon fruit, smuggling them through customs as if they were Marange diamonds. Meanwhile, at the small house, their scrawny young girlfriends are just hassling the houseboys. Our eyes run all through October, slash-and-burnt like rhizomes. We hear the drum’s skin crackling as it curls. We smell the coming rain. Archangel, your time draws near.

Everything is half here, like the marble head of the Roman emperor and the lean torso of his favorite. The way the funnel cloud which doesn't seem to touch ground does— flips a few cars, a semi— we learn to walk miles above our bodies. The pig farms dissolve, then the small hills. As in dreams fraught with irrevocable gestures, the ruined set seems larger, a charred palace the gaze tunnels through and through. How well we remember the stage— the actors gliding about like petite sails, the balustrade cooling our palms. Not wings or singing, but a darkness fast as blood. It ended at our fingertips: the fence gave way to the forest. The world began.

It has never been so easy to cry openly or to acknowledge children. Never before could I walk directly to the center of an island city feeling the automatism of millions drawing one pious breath, shouldering the sunset, holding it up in the oily tree-line a while longer. Years ago, I was never sad enough and nothing but a hotel that I could tear to pieces and reconstruct inside a shoebox felt like home. My parents died. Their miserable possessions washed up in other hotels, dioramas of the febrile romantic. I take my first lover, already gray at her temples and more reticent than shy, more tacit than admiring, to the bus stop by the Jewish Museum. We wait in the dark a long time. She does not kiss me. She hurries up out of the oily street onto the humming, fluorescent podium of the last bus where I see her a last time, not waving to me, not lovable, erect in the freedom we traduced years ago in our first kiss. Never deny the power of withdrawal. Never doubt that thought and time make things small. Never refuse the easy exit line or prescribed uncomprehending gesture. At childhood’s end, none can tell happiness from buoyancy. None of it made any difference— the patricides, the hotels ill-constructed, the inconstant starlight of drugs and rebellion. We are no more complicated than our great-grandparents who dreaded the hotel life. Like them, we seek the refuge of warm days in January, a piety whose compulsion is to survive according to explicit laws no young woman adores or young man follows with darling hunger.

Family dinner night, and we are deciding what to save: polar bears or slipper limpets. Girls in Afghanistan or the wolf. We can't save everything but the kids are ready with their banks, the season's extra, the not- ice cream. How does the Afghan girl feel to make our list? We bring more and more money to the table but the list outruns it. My mother comes in from visiting a friend in hospice, sick from all the chemo. When I get whatever it is, she says, I want you to do nothing. It's only May and already they've declared a statewide drought. Yesterday I hiked over a river that was not there. Coral reefs, my son says, that's what I want to save. And so we do. Whatever is happening to us is deductible. Silence of the was-river, was-bear. In the movies everyone is building some kind of ark.

Bastard, the other boys teased him, till Phaethon unleashed the steeds of Armageddon. He couldn’t hold their reins. Driving the sun too close to earth, the boy withered rivers, torched Eucalyptus groves, until the hills burst into flame, and the people’s blood boiled through the skin. Ethiopia, land of   burnt faces. In a boy’s rage for a name, the myth of race begins.

You may know me, watchful one, by my alias Old Man, Buccaneer, Water Strider, Bilious Busted Monometer of Planetary Celsius. No? Go fuck yourself. I’m listening to Delius, “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring,” envious Of ovenbirds, swallows, swifts, clamorous canaries; furious At the soft-bedded shale and its gaseous Nonlethal vapors. I’m not laughing. I’m hilarious. I have a problem,it does,they do, you, him, I, us, All creatures craven and judicious Having departed in kayaks and fuming Kias. Has it not been foretold, Leviticus, lascivious One? — The way you bade us kneel, twisted like a Möbius Belt, before insinuating your noxious Nectar — omnivorous, odoriferous, officious Orifice-filler, you. In a previous Proxy you descended, empty charioteer, to query us About our outerwear’s whereabouts. Think on it, Rufous- Headed woodpecker, use your barbed brain, be suspicious Of high motives as you crown yourself on the dead tree as Who comes to your rescue? Not I. Unconscious Tremors, climbing the coils of the virtuous Time-worn wooden flesh, leave me be. “Witty Is As Witty Does,” sings the sorry fellow atop his eggs. Hush. He’ll sit through anything. As in days of yore, he is Blooming, blazing, withering with his prize zinnias.

1 & the radio reports how in 2050 farming Massachusetts will be like farming Georgia— all’s flux, no one can say what will grow in Georgia, where maples will grow then or whose fine taps will sap sugar from the cold in spring. Will we get syrup from the boreal forest, peaches from Massachusetts? 2 Drone strikes & opium poppies. Oil spills & poisoned wells. Drought zone. Famine. War zone. 3 Artisanal, this intervention: what gift this day. 4 My inner cynic says don’t bother this is navel gazing & my friend at Yale says my hunger to be near zucchinis will not save the planet from real hunger except I remember in the film on gleaning when the priest in his compassion says: those who glean now out of spiritual hunger also should be fed. 5 Ecosystem of yard or field or mind: these cucumbers are more art than science, more daydream than global action (if we separate the two). But digging now I feel an otherness— life, a great inhuman freedom— here I work a plot that also grounds—