Here is a poem from my latest collection, The Dragon of Sassafras Mountain. It is on my mind right now because it seems particularly apt to this election season. Never mind that the "news" media seems incapable of focusing on the plain fact that the choice is not between two sets of policy proposals, or between a woman of color and a quirky old white man, but between a fascist who has promised to abort the United States' experiment with constitutional democracy and a sane person who is committed to revivifying that experiment. There's something even greater at stake: the existential threat to our civilization and possibly to our species posed by human-induced global warming. Just the other day I listened to a report on the radio about the recently increasing popularity of Formula 1 racing in the U.S. Barely mentioned, and then as something of an afterthought, was the impact upon climate change of the automative and fossile fuel industries which this sport represents and promotes. One would have thought that was necessary context; but so shallowly has the threat penetrated our mainstream media's collective consciousness that the focus of this reporting was on clever marketing and gee-whiz internal combustion vehicle technology. Anyway... in the book, the poem's title is After the Fall:
The world will not miss us.
Absent the phantom pastels of maps,
the continents will break
what the sun alone pours
into billions of vivid splashes.
Plenty will shake the air long after
the echoes of Elizabeth Bishop
singing that word "maps"
dissipate in the general molecular swirl.
A cold time will come, and a time of rains.
Much will cease before the sky
clears blue and blank as a baby's eye,
then turns puffy with random squalls,
every morning and evening bloodshot,
flags of red that signal nothing but
themselves, their flaring, fading moment.
Truly, there will be no ideas but in things.
All verse will be unmeasured and blank:
stones' slow, guttural epics
alongside, above, and under
hissing, volatile lyrics of streams;
lilting couplets of insects, birds,
animals, and fish; vast sonnets
of vegetable love; oceans' massive mutter.
The world will not miss us.
The world will not miss us.
Vines will wind among the trees
untrained by any Miltonic gardeners.
Beetles striped yellow and brown
will eat wild food and no one's pickles.
If dogs and cats survive their masters,
their whelps and kittens will erase
the dim line between feral and domestic.
There will be no ruins, no vermin, only
cockroaches and rats at play in the
interesting new jumble. No one,
sweating through the noon's higher heat,
will recall what I now recall: a boy,
restless at midnight, trolling for
visions through a mumbling window
of his sleeping family's home,
startled by a sudden, white glare.
It throws him off the couch cushions
to his feet, tensed for flight, laughing
to see it's a car, not a bomb. Since then,
two children have come to me,
eight new limbs They may cut off.
Every day, I watch my children's growing
awareness of what careens this way.
The world will not miss us.
