Earth alarms sound in the Arctic.
Meltwater cascades from summer sea ice.
Earth alarms sound in the Amazon.
Jungle turns to smoke.
CO2 is acid ocean.
CO2 is acid rain.
CO2 is eating ozone.
CO2: the choking air.
Deluge of unfrozen ice then dries and bleaches channels.
Corn, potatoes, rice, and wheat won’t freeze so soon in winter.
We’ll eat and be the fatter, but in the warmer, drier land,
frostbite is a fantasy.
Lands catch fire in November,
weather set wild in drought, quake, and flood.
Take a breath while you can
before we’re refugees at the mercy of genociding climate.
Deep into the forest the love of land is born,
which marries with the energy harvested by the wind and sun.
To power the city, industrial knives slit the landscape,
black scars of lignite to light the bulbs.
Just beside the sea of solar panels light the same bulbs.
Which will be swallowed by the sea?
How long before we paint the smokestacks green?
How long before mother paints them for us?
Currents of rivers and oceans, coasts and plains of winds,
desert sun oasis, killing coal and oil,
killer economics until there’s nothing left to kill.
The innovative spirit of American capital for roads, air, and space has died
by the hand of apathy.
When we again come together, it will be too late.
Circuit board cities suck power,
but the earth is not a computer.
Mother’s not a board.
She’s the insects of the forest near the tiny trailer home
off the grid. She’s ethanol from the Indonesian
Arenga Sugar Palm.
She’s fuel briquettes from African farm waste.
She’s rural solar power on the rooftop of a clinic,
hydrogen busses in Iceland,
repowering coal plants for biomass,
cyclists in commute,
rain barrels for the garden,
building turbines to suck carbon from the air,
launching an earth sized parasol,
shooting the sea into the air with stratospheric aerosols,
making a pledge to pollute less,
to turn the lights on less, to drive less, to walk more, to take the elevator less,
to think more, to take less, to grow food more, to grow business less.
Let the solar lantern illuminate the path from India to Burma, Uganda to Uruguay.
Bullshit.
We’ll grow until we pop.
Greenland Inuit ice fishing
becomes Greenland commercial fishing.
Freeze-dried laundry on the tundra close line in Nuugaatsiaq
becomes laundromat lines and kilowatts in Nebraska.
Polar bear pants and seal skin jackets
become discount fleeces and sweat pants.
Tropical island Kiribati
becomes a swamp of one room huts on stilts.
The sandy beach
becomes a sandbag wall.
Where’s the lichen for the Woodland Caribou?
The seals for the Arctic Fox?
Peninsular Pronghorns are thirsty for the rainfall.
White Fronted Lemur’s habitat?
Slashed and burned for agriculture.
The Chinstrap Penguin?
Hungary for krill, which are hungry for algae, which are burned by too much sun.
Bengal tigers disappear into the tall, dry grass.
Spectacled Eider disappears with the tundra wetlands.
And here we are:
the next to disappear.
—
Kole Matheson is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a Lecturer of English Composition and Literature at Old Dominion University. He is a poet and scholar of rhetorical and indigenous studies.
