or

Paen to the Pandemic

Cooped up in our private souls for years,
caught in this pandemic with our fears,
tired of self-examination, we
touch our open eyes so tenderly
insisting they should close and send us back
into the sweet blind Normal we now lack.

Keep them open!  We must learn to see,
care and understand what soon must be
a very different world of trial and strife,
averting the apocalypse of life
on this, our overpopulated Earth.
Our choice is now extinction or rebirth.

16 July 2022

The Thompson River steelhead run once numbered
many thousands; now it’s more like ten.
Four decades since I last became encumbered
by guilt from killing one, a mortal sin.

Between the lust for jobs! and rights! and profits!
the other Oncorhynchus species soon
will perish too, our ecosystem’s soffits
lost to the rot of greed and baking noon.

When all the fish are caught and eaten, slain
from rivers, lakes and streams, and from the sea,
we’ll learn that seafood truly feeds the brain
and how much stupider we still can be.

12 March 2023

This dry arroyo was a little brook
where lovely golden trout would come to spawn
until another toilet flushing took
the last drop left by lush suburban lawns.

This reservoir is nearly empty now.
Once built to flood a habitat for power,
the turbines barely turn. I wonder how
we thought another thousand farms could flower.

This well was once artisian, spouting clear,
but now a deeper pipe is driven down
to chase the aquifer receding here
and send the drinking water into town.

This water tap once ran as clear as glass,
but now is murky with a musty smell
since factories made people “lower class”
by making neighborhoods resemble Hell.

This forest once had half a million trees
until they parched in summer’s baking heat
and some spark set a raging fire free —
now only sylvan memories are sweet.

This little stream has now become a river,
swollen with the deluge — in a day
the rain of half a normal year delivered —
and all the work of humans swept away.

12 March 2023

We fly away from that initial Bang,
and yet we cling together.  Gravity
pulls even protons into stellar gangs,
pressing them to fuse so brilliantly

they burn and light the sky for many eons,
waiting for their neighbors to explode
and spew abroad their heaviest accretions
to bond into a planetary lode.

And as the comets crash upon those worlds,
on some a sea may form and nurture life
which turns organic gases into swirls
of oxygen and compost – sugars rife –

that sink under the weight of other layers
until their fire is stored in fossil form
to wait until discovered by surveyors
who dig it up and burn it, trading harm

for profit, thus dispersing to the air
the carbon that our ancestors accreted,
now threatening to bake our planet bare.
At least H. sap. is soon to be deleted!

11 March 2023

Walking this trail beside the stream
among the ferns and evergreens
I smell the skunky stink of bog
and spice of rotting cedar log.
Familiarity’s embrace
makes this path a soothing place
but longing for discovery
of unknown vistas tugs at me.

There’s only so far I can hike,
so now I ride upon my bike
along this little winding strip
of broken asphalt to the ship
that waits to carry me away
to other shores and other days.
But still I yearn for greater scale,
impatient with the speed of sail.

And so I wait to board a plane
and fly above the clouds so fast
and far and high that I can gain
no knowledge of what trickles past
below me, or of how the place
I go connects to where I’ve been.
Will those who live there know my face
if someday I should come again?

(7 March 2023)

I can’t see you down there
living your life with all its
delicious triumphs and tragedies.
I am too high and moving too fast
and there are so many of you.
Next time maybe I’ll bike.

2023

To be in new places
with new people, new sights, new delights
is the only way to learn some things
that we need to know.
But to be there you have to go there
and eventually come back.
From this the lessons are never new.

2023