After Kate Marvel & Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s conversation in the book What if We Get it Right?: Visions of Climate Futures
We should stop talking about the end of the world.
Climate change is not a comet hitting the Earth.
Things don’t end all at once.
Things don’t end only once—
e.g.: thirty years after the disaster, wolves
run in numbers in Chernobyl.
When I was small, I gripped handlebars, the smell of earth & exhaust
& my own sweat thick in my helmet as my dad told me “look
where you want to go.” I was dizzied with the power
I had over my own situation. He was right:
I fixated on the tree, & crashed head into it.
We spend too much time staring down disaster.
There is a future,
on this planet, in the wreck, where a mother still
runs a comb through her daughter’s damp hair,
separates the strands into sections, meditatively
weaves the hair over itself, braiding
in the direction she wants it to fall.
The world has threatened to end many times, & the sun keeps rising.
Oak trees can be storm-battered, having lost limbs, & go on
living for hundreds of years. They rebuild their crowns.
Even after the oak falls in the forest, life continues.
The fallen tree feeds a feast to fungi.
The body, the bark return to humus.
There is a future on this planet, after 2 degrees, after you & me
have gone to soil, there will still be humans, here, doing all of the things humans do.
Fathers still teach their daughters to ride bikes.
There is a girl there, who looks just like you.
She likes to sing. She whistles to the birds, they chirp back.
Her favorite time of day is just after the sun sets, but before it gets dark.
& there is another girl, she has my eyes. She tells stories—from her grandmother,
from books, from somewhere in her bones. Captures sap from maple trees,
boils it sweet. They live. They love. Oh, they love.
—
Camille Ferguson is a poet from Ohio, a heart-shaped place on the beautiful Planet Earth. Her work has been published in literary magazines including Passages North and Drunk Monkeys, as well as the anthology Light Enters the Grove. She has received a Pushcart nomination and was a finalist for 2022’s Best of the Net. Camille has a passion for our parks and remaining wild spaces and spends as much time in them as she can.
