Listen up people, seeking better lives through technology.
You can’t stop our waters from rising. Continue to contaminate
oceans with carbon dioxide, trash, sewage, and we will spew
forth so many hurricanes, you’ll run out of names for them.
We’re not your toilet bowel, junk yard, not the world dump.
You’re a selfish species- more money, bigger homes, latest
gadgets can’t mask torrential rains, wild fires, heat waves.
We, the oceans, control weather! We’re heating up,
and you, unconscious lot, will see, too late, that turtles,
tuna, coral reefs are gone. We absorb 95% of all carbon!
We’re more than scenic views, surfing, swimming. Humans
will be banned from bathing in our waters as negligence
turns us into cesspools of methane gas. You’re denser than
the earth’s core! You fret over frivolous, as extinction spreads
like a firestorm. Lawyers can’t argue away our truths.
Soon our melting ice will release ancient bacteria and plagues.
Half the world will be under water or too hot to grow plants.
Wars will be pandemic as the rich and clever covet resources.
Your out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality guarantees that
grains in the hour glass of your lives are about to run out.
—
Joan Gerstein, a retired educator and therapist, was been writing poetry since elementary school. Her first book of poetry, Theories of Relativity, was published in 2021 by Garden Oak Press. Joan has taught creative writing to incarcerated veterans for 7 years.
