You people of now, heed Earth’s wounded self.
It has much to say of the burning toll
it will demand from desert to ice shelf
when its death rattles sound from pole to pole.
Think you, we can treat Gaia like a slave,
sweat it, gouge it, wound it, as now we do,
without Earth rising up itself to save
us from our trashy habits and wilding crew?
An angry age will come when Earth no more
will bear our wastrel habits or our greed,
and its great shoulders heave, its hot breath roar,
till frail humankind can no longer breed.
You may presume this sonnet is a lie,
but stormy Earth will have the last reply.
—
George Thomas, member of the Silent Generation, Navy veteran and retired machinist, earned his MFA at Eastern Washington University. He co-founded and edited Willow Springs there and published the monthly George & Mertie’s Place for six years. Previously published in Anglo-Welsh Review, Work Literary Magazine, Willow Springs, Bellowing Ark, Crab Creek Review, Kestrel, Southern Poetry Review and North Dakota Quarterly to name a few, a poem is scheduled to appear soon in Another Chicago Magazine.
