Mid-October in Northeastern Ohio,
The leaves starting to believe in themselves.
I am sitting atop Myers Knob, my bare feet
Pressing the naked earth,
Allowing eons of ions and their healing
Energy to seep into my being.
Two titanium hips and a knee later,
I realize we are not born to wear
Steel-toed boots as I did 33 years
At a power plant,
Now as extinct as the fossil fuel
It once burned.
Coal undisturbed in its Epochal bed
Between sandstone and shale
Is docile, contained. Once
We took a torch to it
Began the tragic black magic.
Pulled out of a stack, the flashes
Of fly ash, finer than sand, abrasive as sin,
Flowed like water into the water,
Scattered in the wind like poisonous pollen.
We tried to staunch all those pinhole leaks,
Before they expanded to the size of a God thumb.
We tried to dike the pipes and silos
With bag houses, filters, certified welds,
Even duct tape and greased rags, our efforts merely
Amounting to stop arterial bleeding
With a Band-Aid. The only effective cover was
Denial.
At a seminar I listened
To a meteorologist predict our state
Will have the same annual weather
As now does Arkansas, already turned red
And I’m not referring to the yet-to-peak foliage.
To my left stand three effigy-less wood crosses;
On the mountain top across the Ohio
Tower three internet transmission towers,
Polar opposites these days.
I don’t believe in either.
—
Robert E. Petras is a resident of Toronto, Ohio and a graduate of West Liberty University. His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in more than 200 publications across the world. He is a certified naturalist, pollinator steward, sylvotherapy practitioner, nutritionist and personal fitness trainer. Published in the spring of 2024, Petras’s sci-fi novel, The Locust People, addresses the environmental consequences of hydraulic fracturing.
