... and other signs of progress
We’ve learned:
white is not created or destroyed.
A proposal:
mirrors, reflect stars
back to the sky.
Show the sun what we see.
Out! Out!
Corrosive, compounding sun,
can’t you grasp this beauty?
This heat?
To human is:
the miracle of rolling away the stone. Only,
the stone, as if myth, persisted. Lived so
long we missed its story. The birth of
stone to our dull witness.
A retelling:
the earth, deserving praise, rolled itself
hither and thither in front of a cave
seeking the love of the unseeing.
Revelation – if you’re looking.
This poem is about climate change. Or, more notably, our relationship to it. The primary thread is that time and time again we miss the point and only assess things from the perspective of human dominance. This poem reimagines the Easter story as though the protagonist was the stone, the thing that remained, the thing that may even still remain.
I read a book last year (unfortunately timed during the Seattle heat wave) called Under A White Sky: The Nature of the Future, which was in theory a decent and fascinating book but it really disturbed me… I entered full-fledged existential dread mode. It was all about ways in which humans have attempted to and will continue to interfere with nature to “save it” from itself. The elephant in the room here is that we (westernized humans) are notoriously bad about thinking in long time horizons or “deep time”, so even with good intentions we may be throwing the natural order of things way out of whack and, more likely than not, are doing these things to protect ourselves first and foremost.
Anyway, one proposal in the book was to litter the sky with white reflective particles in order to reflect the sun back into space in order to cool the Earth. This would mimic some of the effects of great volcanic eruptions (like the year without a summer in 1816). I tried my hand at putting a poetic spin on this above.
If you want some titularly adjacent joy my little brothers and I used to (still do) love the “oh’s” in this song: White Sky by Vampire Weekend.
Thanks to D for helping me reign this one in. At one point it had the line “Coral bleaching. / Aftermath fit for an idiot / king. Coastline collateral confetti.” A little on the nose… probably.