Australian researchers say rising sea levels have wiped out a rodent that lived on a tiny outcrop in the Great Barrier Reef, in what they say is the first documented extinction of a mammal species due to human-caused climate change.
– New York Times, 14 June 2016
Did you know you were the only one left?
Had you watched your siblings starve or drown?
Had you waited, or wandered seeking,
in vain for a mate? Had you searched in vain
for succulent purslane, for crevices where
you could curl safe in sleep?
You must have found the plants dead
in every spot you once had munched fresh leaves.
You couldn’t have known what killed them,
couldn’t have known that rising seas
had poisoned what soil they hadn’t washed away.
You must have cowered
through frequent, violent storms.
You couldn’t have known that storms had become
more frequent and more violent
than your kind had ever experienced before
in the million years they’d evolved to fit
perfectly the compact habitat
of a ten-acre outcrop of coral reef.
Even if fear of people had passed down
to you from ancestors that survived
when European sailors shot the “rats”
they found on Bramble Cay, you had no way to know
that humans living high on vast lands
were destroying by their profligate habits
your low-lying islet home, your sole place on Earth.
—
Eleanor Berry’s latest poetry collection, Works of Wildfire, won the 2022 Grayson Books Chapbook Award. Previous publications include Green November (Traprock Books, 2007), No Constant Hues (Turnstone Books of Oregon, 2015), and Only So Far (Main Street Rag, 2019). A past president of the Oregon Poetry Association and the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Berry holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and has taught at colleges and universities in Wisconsin and Oregon.
