Global Atlantis: Not just one ringed capital city; many cities, now drowned, ringing continents

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LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

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APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres

Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
Poems, mine and theirs

Global Atlantis

I wander this world unmindful,
Evoking aurora ghosts of inland glaciers
And ice-melt specters of continental  tsunamis 
That rose mile-high in the sky. 

I  roam the dusty talus of Atlantis,
An elderly world of milk and honey, 
Its stratosphere a creamy ice-fog
Blood-warmed from below by steady Gulf Streams
And like heat conveyors but more numerous. 

Look up at the night sky blackened from our lights
The few remaining stars follow their transit, barely distorted.
The sky used to glow with ice prism auroras:
Digital video, not our analog lamp black. 

The Sun and Moon were fairer back then, 
Kaleidoscopic  incandescent, sometime mirror-twinned,
Beyond the horizon of the night, crystal skies glowed
Stacked  in many jet streams. 

Laser-shows shown screened on the Moon, easy on the eye.
All sun-suffused in complementary colors, 
Never the same for very long. 
Its light flared briefly or shimmered all year long. 

The air's iodine tang sang like good crystal
Misty, chill, and still; spelled by tonic, dry breezes
Warmth dependable along those shores: 
Sub-tropical by day, refreshing by night. 

Birds flocked virgin woods and shores,
They filled the world with their song 
Echoed the flash and froth of schooling fish,
And the jade of trees as far as the eye can see.

 ...

But hold on! Something’s wrong!
Birds grab for air; dogs howl. 
The solid ground – long fixed by massive ice fields
Moans, quivers and gives way.

A dozen Lake Superiors thunder down
Torrents topped by icebergs
Frigid lakes a mile deep and hundreds broad,
Frozen atop continental ridges, one of dozens, 
Perhaps hundreds at one time or another. 

When one such ice dam melts and gives way,
Great or small, per its frequency in time,
A cliff of water hurtles to the sea
It floods intervening mountain passes
Rushes down watersheds and valleys
The way good cavalry trots its rough ground,
Then charges, this time to the sea. 

Every few thousand years, more or less, 
Melted ice poured out from the highest lands
Across lowlands to the continental shelf and out to sea.

Search a map for massive mountain heights
Set a teardrop to roll down from their breast
Raise the sea level little by little between ice ages.
Draw lines across those continents
The length and breadth of mountains and watersheds.
These intersections would shed ice tears. 

From those central heights,
Enough melted ice to freshen the ocean
And flood marine shelves formerly shallow or dry
Up to our sea level in incremental waves
Several feet deeper? Several hundred? What matter?

Down mighty streams,
Howling down mountain valleys, scouring plains,
Crossing mountain passes like speed bumps
Walls of water spread out right and left,
Vomited from their reservoir for days on end.
Like life, down different valleys
At different speeds and to different ends

A dozen stacked Aswan Dams burst as one.
Pyroclastic thunderclaps crown it,
Churning icebergs, massive trees and crashing boulders,
Lava flows; lightning arcs and thunders like the end of the world.
Its blast wave mows whole forests along its path
Nothing escapes its midstream.

This cement truck slurry, lahar liquid mass 
Is so heavy, it triggers volcanism along its path,
Unbinds the earth, shakes fault lines free.
Global tectonics waken from their frigid slumber,
The Earth rocks and rolls, it rings like tubular bells.
Lava slithers out, hot rock scours by the megaton.

An icy tear rolls into the ocean.
Would it really matter from where? 
Reaching the coastline, it spreads out right and left
Then combs the facing shore.

Sometimes, one continent bakes alone,
It sheds its rare ice in one fell burst, as in Africa?
Others shed theirs at random: 
Each new-shed tear at some solar frequency. 

These floods unfold across downslope glaciers
That absorb their scour and refreeze afterwards. 
Those ice sheets, withdrawing or advancing later on,
Leave no trace of the catastrophe.

The seas topped off, old history ends and ours begins.
So much ice water spilled into tropical seas:
Enough to crash planetary climate.
Forty days of rain? Not once but much longer and more often.
Not in one region alone, but along many coastlines.

When lowlands went dry,
Since tall glaciers wrung water from the clouds
And froze it between mountain breasts,
What cities adorned them?
Refined, cosmopolitan, eco-sensitive, 
Better lovers of freedom and equality than we?

What stories shared before they were scoured away
And their habits forgotten?
What did they sing about with passion?
About what follows or better? 

Their tidy villages, their beacon cities,
Home ports of a nautical world civilization
Gifted with craft, art and subtle commerce,
And more child laughs than parent tears. 

Cities strung like pearls along silver rivers 
With parishes of baroque craft and seasonal fruit,
Set on unmapped deltas of the
Ganges/Mekong, Mississippi/Orinoco,  and Seine/Thames/Rhine? 
And smaller streams no less noble.

Continents were close-packed back then,
Athwart seas one could almost walk across,
So bountiful were the fish.  so incandescent the sea life
Denser barrier reefs lined coastlines with ,
Mile-wide seaweed rafts  sweet and savory,
Whose liquors you would not  believe.

Mild seas in good season,
With mini-monsoons easy to navigate.
Islands where our shallows are, mountains on our islands.
Ships sheltered there from storms more dramatic than perilous;
Their currents and winds much milder. 

More littorals and alluvial fields than those today.
Much of it perfect bottom land fat with fertility
Flaunting the occasional, scenic ridge line.
Many more smiling harbors 
Backed by bottom-land begging for the plow. 

Biodiversity of Amazonian prodigality.
Much more biomass than ours.
Entire ecologies of which we know nothing,
Mighty forests of exquisite trees:
Teak by the acre, rosewood by the square mile.
Drowned, buried and forgotten: an alien world
Just before the current one. 

Sealed for ballast: fruit, nuts and berries by the shipload;
Wine and liqueurs you would not  believe,
Perfect coffee, tea and other infusion plants
Wild game beyond a hunter’s dreams,
Wilderness untouched at most landings.
The best Feng Chui spots picked for new cities. 

Along rivers as noble as the Nile
That had never beheld Man before,
Up to rapids cascading from chill-dusted hills.
A new city was set at the foot of the rapids,
Its sister, beacon city, at the river’s mouth. 

Surrounded by bright painted fishing flotillas ,
At a day’s sailing along empty shores.
Self-reliant centers of artistry and learning,
Proud sharers of global peace and culture. 

Newcome ships and their welcome crew,
The mayor declares a holiday to share world news
And trade rare spices, perfumes and master craftwork.
Their wisdom recited as sacred poetry:
Drama, myths and epics, old and new.
Writing confined to accounting, inventories, calendars and such?
And every wrong story forgotten? 

All this in peace and  relative abundance,
Worshiping the Goddess of generosity and disaster.
Perhaps many more than our billions,
With Golden Age wisdom that should have been ours.
This wisdom deep in our guts and soul.
Admit that much at least.
This wisdom we have fumbled,
Drowned as much as that past life.

Imagine those citizens heading for an evening party,
In the humble opulence of their security,
Their doors unlocked as usual, 
During the next perfect twilight, as the horror unfolds. 

Look out!!! A tidal wave looms miles high!
It is not coming from the sea, but from inland!
It flattens the horizon’s crested ridge-line,
It is too enormous to make sense of,
None can fully grasps its giant scale. 

Forget upstream cities; beacon ones flooded.
The ocean rises a few more feet for good measure
Only a few survivors claw their way up the hills
Wetlands flood first, then the lowlands.
Beacon islands become shallows. 

Pull your towns up into the foothills, then higher.
Evacuate beacon cities to higher ground,
Abandon precious fields and pastures.
The forest fringe dies in a footprint of salt. 

Imagine that they had figured out their fate.
That bold explorers surveyed highland glaciers,
Did their math and pulled their beards,
Published mournfully once they'd summed up doom. 

That cliff of water – too deep to exist –
Once it erased everything,
Human superconscience, desperate to heal, 
Forgot it, shrank it to a tolerable scale. 

The tale of an old sot called Noah, Chosen by God; 
Or of Gilgamesh swept far away;
Of an ark of refugees, a flotilla of ancient heroes;
Of warnings heeded by a few and none among the rest,
Of fortnight torrents when everyone died. 

This flood must have come from somewhere, 
Perhaps from the bowels of the Earth
Said to seal a dozen Atlantics incandescent rock.
Volcanoes  ejaculated superhot steam
That rose to the troposphere to cool off there
And rain and rain and rain? 

We perch on the uplands of this world.
Our continental shelves are flooded.
What little we see, must be; what’s left, cannot be.
High up here where the air is thin,
And the world, a lot less green:
Less oxygen than that  for good dreams. 

Highland rapids blocked easy commerce 
To and from their Niles, Danubes and Amazons.
The abundance of the shore and plain below
Was confined to old coasts and river lines.

Upland, none but rare shepherds and mountain men.
Take your pick between lowland plenty 
Or savage wilderness and brutality. 

Jericho’s salt and the obsidian of Catal-Huyuk:
Luxury exports from upland trappers?
From tiny, lonely settlements windswept and abandoned 
By all but ignorant fanatics.
The rest prefer lowland splendor.  

Were there shelters from those disasters?
Crouching behind mountain ramparts
Set high enough to shrug off the flood,
Nestled in valleys turned dreadful,
That left a few ruined survivors?

Braudel spoke of disaster shelters on Mediterranean uplands,
Of farms perched hundreds of feet above the sea.
Others traced of the source of the Vedas to Himalayan foothills.

Or did galley raiders set loose catastrophe
Sterilize coastlines, as usual
Land starving marines to lay waste and sail away
Make those shores “prehistoric” for centuries to come, 

Yugas, and ages, and epochs gone by, 
Survivors bore Veda chalices to shelter, 
Their wisdom carefully memorized.
Did those lamps of wisdom cast their guttering light
Into the next Dark Age, ours? 

And we silly fools think ourselves fine fellows,
With no superior forebears,
Only highland outcasts chipping flint?
Even though superior sages sleep beneath the waves?  

Their cities deep underneath salt water and silt
Under sea-slides of sand and of rock;
Don't look for cement, rammed earth or native rock; 
But deposits of gold, silver, copper, bronze and iron: pure by the ton.

Enough metal to rouse our counters; 
Whereas simple architecture
Lies buried under sea-slide hills
Deep under the wine-dark sea. 

What else could those ruins tell us? 
Enough ice age energy to shift continents?
Drain oceans and frost highlands with deep ice.
Enough ice flood to split Pangaea into its daughter continents? 

Enough tumult to erase a civilization or three,
Flood, drown and wash them out to sea,
Until the survivors learned to read again 
Having forgotten this alien but very human world. 

The rattle and clatter of tectonic plates,
The molten, broken glassware of lava. 
A scullion stacks after a hard night.
Pulled apart, heaped up and slammed together
Like peeling house paint and  crackling mud tiles
On the flood plains of New Orleans?

Is that the fate that awaits us? A last tear-drop cast
From Greenland pinnacles or Antarctic crevasse?
From comet or asteroid strike, perhaps
Swinging sunward to sweep us away? 
Else global warming in the teeth of the dominant species this minute
Each time more stupid?

Recall the ancient shepherd’s lament,
Of delirious victims who babbled in agony
Of a golden age long gone, of Atlantis cities in rings.

EN FRANCAIS
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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net