We never meant for it to happen.
Perhaps that is why we resist
owning the responsibility of it:
that we, like children, didn’t mean to.
We didn’t mean to spill our garbage
so far abroad it eddies in distant ocean currents,
far from land or civilization. The plastic cups
were blown out of the pickup by the wind.
At 70 miles an hour, who had time to stop
and retrieve them? We never thought about where
they went after that, specks in the rearview,
bouncing across the road toward the beach.
We didn’t see invisible gases spit from our tailpipes,
or imagine they could warm the entire planet.
We wanted to see America; so we pulled out of the drive.
We wanted security; so we left the lights on.
We wanted a better view, so we cleared the trees.
Their wood burned in our fireplaces, curling
picturesque smoke out of perfect winter chimneys.
No one understood the consequence.
No one thought it’d get this big.
The candidates we elected to fix things sounded reasonable:
we believed they wouldn’t care about themselves
more than the rest of us. We the People, just like us.
But once ballots were cast, they ducked heads,
closed doors, and spoke in whispers.
The only thing that changed were their faces.
When hope faded and the news got too depressing,
we busied our lives, and in caring more about ourselves,
we chose not to see the growing number of tattered army jackets
clutching cardboard.at the intersections.
We decorated our living rooms with glowing screens,
and invited the corporations to tell us how much we needed to care
which sports teams won or what deodorant to buy.
To see the world, we changed the channels.
To make it safe, we started wars.
We didn’t mean to.
No one thought the ice caps would melt.
Blind, we thought there was nothing to see.
And deaf, we were certain there were no alarms.
—
Patrick Dixon is a retired educator and commercial fisherman living in Olympia, Washington. His work is published in Cirque Literary Journal, Panoplyzine, Raven Chronicles, National Fisherman magazine, The Smithsonian and the anthologies FISH 2015, WA129 (2017), and I Sing the Salmon Home (2022) among others. He was also included in the Washington State Book Award anthology, Take a Stand: Art Against Hate (2020). Dixon is on the Board of Directors of the Olympia Poetry Network. He is a past poetry editor of National Fisherman magazine’s quarterly, North Pacific Focus (2010-2019). He received an Artist Trust Grant for Artists to edit Anchored in Deep Water: The FisherPoets Anthology (2014). His poetry chapbook Arc of Visibility won the 2015 Alabama State Poetry Morris Memorial Award. In June of 2023, he won the Cirque Poetry of Place competition. His memoir, Waiting to Deliver, about his 20 years fishing for salmon on Cook Inlet, Alaska, was published in 2022.
