WORLD WAR COVID
Poems, mine and theirs
Pavane for a dead planet
I dedicate this poem to Phillip Wylie, 1902 -1971. He wrote, among many other books, articles and movies on interesting topics, The End of the Dream, Daw Books by arrangement with Doubleday & Co., New York, NY, 1972; and Triumph. The first title prophesies with clinical precision a global series of post-industrial, environmental catastrophes we live through today; the next one describes nuclear war.
The world of my youth,
I mourn it already.
It curls to cinder from our body heat,
Its skin blisters from human breath.
Yet trees grow by the thousands of miles,
A third of a million new babies each day,
And humans hustle and bustle
But some stop and ask, “What’s wrong?”
What can I say?
“We are walking dead
Living in a dream soon turned nightmare.
We are burning down the world.”
If human breath doubles exponentially,
Half the natural world could remain intact
Reassuring us for a while,
Yet the last half will vanish overnight?
Rich idiots prefer their petty busyness
Too few of one and all pay attention
To bring back common sense
And cast this train wreck into reverse.
I'm not innocent.
I got my one-ton keychain,
My tons of CO2 for every pound of flesh
My ardent, wanton ways.
I’m just as much to blame,
My only purity from long, hot showers,
Not the icy ones of the pure.
With a good light to read by, day and night.
So what leads me to foresee,
Amid this fireworks display,
The heat-death must be repaid,
Like every debt in the end?
I was shown what this world will look like
Once our fiery breath is done,
Once Man has burned his way
Across the heavens, plains and seas.
Trans-continental Saharas,
Lifeless, framed by sterile seas,
From end to end of every land
Sterile mud under torrents of rain.
Cinder plains and scatters of rock,
Mud blistered in the heat
Washed down choking waterways
No fish swim, no insect or bird flies above.
All the ice chased away from the Earth,
From summits tall and broad,
From both poles despite their chill
From ice forgotten for sweaty winters.
Gone the Amazon jungle and tropical forests,
Along with temperate ones scorched to desert.
Gone the reefs, sterilized
In seas over-heated, acidified and oxygen-starved.
When nightmares began,
I took them for nuclear war:
Disinfection by clear radiation.
That's our fate, war or no.
From fear of cold, of want and of starvation,
We set fire to the larder,
To world house furniture,
To works not yet written.
If only to get a little more cozy,
We threw away our kids’ future,
Our hopes and dreams to come,
Into Moloch's flaming maw.
This planet is not mine —
I must repeat that to myself —
Not mine, this sorry sack of flesh
Sagging softly to its grave.
I grow too fond of them,
This world, its sweet birdsong,
The soothing shimmer of springtime green
Backed by true blue sky,
And plenty renewed.
I miss the cricket whirr,
The bud of young plants,
The moist funk of rich loam,
And yearly promise to grow back.
XXX
The planet of my youth,
Quite hot at times,
But rarely scorching,
Moderate in its manners.
For every killing plain
Baking with thirst and famine,
Many more filled with life
Out beyond the horizon.
Killing cold, sometimes,
Deadly frost in black and white,
As hard as steel wire that moans in the wind,
Yet always renewed by springtime.
For every frozen tundra,
Sucking body heat
Like a starving vampire,
Many more landscapes of body heat.
Who cares about the miseries of the past:
Starvation, want and militant panic,
The destruction of cities and civilizations,
The loss of dear ones just before your own?
There was always hope,
A chance to pick up the pieces
And run away to more hospitable climes
Beyond this one of despair.
That will no longer be the case.
The starvation found elsewhere
Equals the merciless one found here,
No matter how far the ramble.
Every day sees another thousand years
Of accumulated bioenergy
Incinerated in hot cylinders,
Burned off this fat planet.
This perpetual flame, this fire worship
Attracts stronger and stronger fire gods,
To rally their Harleys here
And turn all the greenery into wasteland.
Gods who, from accretions of millions of years
In frosted slumber below chill seas,
Summon them to thaw, awaken, froth up
And set the sea itself on fire.
That sets off daily tsunamis
That flood port cities
And drown survivors huddled along shores
In flight from inland deserts.
Across a world left desertic,
No refuge or safety can be found;
The last garden patches
Guarded by destroyers.
Will humanity survive this famine,
Will it hang on to life, no matter what?
Even in the blaze of its last props?
Must I join it in its agony?
Need I revive into the next lifetime
With its familiar famine;
Without seeing a green thing grow,
Sacrificed to feed us?
Will humanity become
The last cattle of humanity?
Soilent Green on the lips of young innocents,
And other sordid barbecues?
Let me pass away beforehand,
Even if my gristle gets crunched.
Let others sink so low,
But not me, not again, please God.
Everyone has served as a slave
And slave master if less often, God forgive us!
During many past lives,
And as cannibals and devoured flesh.
May I never sink into that state again,
Whatever lifetimes I must renew.
Let me cling to my tattered dignity,
My hypocrite pride, for the time being.
Let my brain explode, my vessels rupture,
Let my disappearance be quick and clean,
Serenaded by birdsong
And the laughter of well-fed children.
No more lush fields to plow,
No more fallow land to turn over.
No green contour soothes the eye,
And rubs out the bitter souvenir of famine.
Don’t smell the rich leaf mold of oak groves
The perfume of lavender and rosemary,
The crickets’ chirp and insect buzz,
The sound and light of photosynthesis.
We have forgotten that green transmutes
Into the fireworks of autumn,
That greenery takes on every tint of fire,
Releasing CO2 softly.
This planet of my youth,
I mourn for it already,
Since it will empty soon
From the smoky breath of humans like me.
A better way?
Will the energy of water save us?
(Gerald Pollack, Water, Energy and Life)
From our mass sentence of death?
Or could it be terra preta
Toasting CO2 into wood charcoal,
To renew bleaching clays
Into soils of blackened fertility?
The industrial production of biochar
That grabs CO2 from the air.
And offers high-carbon fertilizer.
Will that cut global warming short?
That might happen.
We can only sigh for mercy
From a Loving God
And His promise of resurrection.
Mighty Gods promised us as much
Long before Jesus
Resurrection, death and rebirth,
For themselves and for us.
The promise of the Sun and the Moon,
Every pair that falls and rises again,
Like winter and spring,
As long as the wise have taken note
I hear they’re perfecting artificial chloroplasts
For cheap brewing, much vigor and fat utility.
Sky scrapers of stacked Petri dishes.
Will those supplement the leafing of trees?
But for the time being,
I can’t glimpse any miracle
To ward off our sordid fate.
And I pixel this pavane.
...
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