The world is a beautiful, blue-green mess with less and less birds.
More and more of the wrong kind of fish. Well. Fish in the wrong
places. We plant species in mistaken spaces and call them “invasive,”
create dishes to convince the masses that Asian Carp really are quite delicious
because they’re demolishing our rivers, thrashing
through disturbed waters like synchronized
dangers. We electrocute them by the thousands, haul
the pall-eyed husks in the hulls of boats out of the homes we placed them in.
We have really gotten quite good at playing god, by which I mean
everything is chaos.
(The oceans are rising, and the rivers are drying up.
Figure that one out.)
We pour poison into the ecosystems we are trying
to protect. I get it—trying to love something to death.
In Small Town USA, we are all calculated risk and chemicals and scared
mostly of the devil.
I am no advocate for fear, but it strikes me that perhaps there are things
we should rather be afraid of than the devil.
There are forever chemicals in our drinking water,
and as evangelicals we should understand this word, the concept of eternity.
I have a dream where the fish stop swimming on their own: slowing
to a stop, paralyzed, plasticized before our eyes. Okay, a nightmare.
It feels like life is an endless string of waiting for results
from cancer screenings, but I can’t afford the tests and the cancer
is everywhere. Most civilizations last only 250 years, the man I almost spent my life with
used to tell me when I was hopeless.
In my dreams, there is no shortage of water, and it washes us
away. I know, I know. God promised, or whatever. This is the problem.
We will have to learn our lesson sans holy intervention. There is no rapture coming
to pluck us from the ashen landscape of our mistakes and wrap us in gold, but one can hope
there will be some revelations. Maybe after one more Spring,
when everything is not new again.
Look—there is an inherent complacency in doom. Most civilizations only last 250 years,
and he said this as a comfort.
There is a passivity to religion, and a rigidity to fear. What the Anthropocene needs
is a little levity, and a whole lot of creativity.
The Anthropocene needs you—
only YOU can prevent the apocalypse.
It is brave to imagine a future.
It is hard to laugh in a world with less birds.
We can at least try, though.
Two things can be true at once: the Earth is fucked
up, and it’s the best we’ve got. And apparently, space
is a cold, endless empty. I’ll take the astronauts’ word for it when they say
you’ll look back at the blue-green mess of a world and want it again, badly.
Listen—I hate to be the one to tell you this.
But you need to know:
There is no rescue flight, and
Mars will not save you.
—
Camille Ferguson is a poet from Ohio, a heart-shaped place on Planet Earth. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines and the book Light Enters the Grove. She was a finalist for the 2022 Best of the Net Awards and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Camille has a passion for our country’s parks and remaining wild places and spends as much time in them as she can.
