Once Upon a Time in America

Two poems about Climate Change

At a time when we are all striving toward some optimism because the future looks so dark, I almost hate to offer this poem I wrote after the 2016 election, knowing Trump was a Climate denier, and worried about the damage he would do on his watch.

Now, after he’s returned and is appointing Chris Wright, a fossil fuel executive and climate change denier, to serve as energy secretary, the future for our planet and humanity’s survival looks darker still.

As I wrestled whether to print this poem here, I listened to a podcast with Jane Hirshfield reading her poem “Let Them Not Say,” which warns about our failure to address Climate Change. We need these warnings.

The jury is out on whether the world we know today will survive the catastrophes that are already unfolding as the planet warms. We’ve known for fifty-four years what is coming if we don’t do something, and yet we still drag our feet.

If what we fear happens, the Earth will survive. It will heal in time. But we, humanity, and the civilizations we’ve built, will not. The jungles and desert sands will swallow us as they swallowed civilizations before us. And perhaps we deserve that.

But much will be lost with our passing.

So I offer below my poem of lament, and Hirshfield’s poem of warning below that.

Once Upon a Time in America

In an eon hence, after the Trojan horse of Trumpism eviscerated a City of Light, and oceans rose and civilizations fell,

Will we be the stuff of legends, our tropes and memes edging pages of ancient texts on crumbling shelves?

Will waves gently lap against the skirts of Liberty and docile doves nestle in her hair?

Will salmon swim upstream through city streets, and coral reefs grow in our gardens,

While the long roots of forests thrum with our stories etched in rings around their trunks?

Will the mocking bird remember our voices? Or the songbirds our songs?

Will crickets by moonlight rub their feet together filling the night with memories of our violins,

While tiny children perched in trees suckle strange fruit, and the bent backs of their elders forage below?

Will the skies with bows of beauty still bend round us? Will the stars cast spears of light upon our heads?

Will the Bald Eagle with its soaring eye see us? Will we see it? And remember how

The long, slow, widening arc of its wings drew round us, once up a time, so long ago.

Deborah J. Brasket

Illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith from the fairy tale Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, 1862

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say:   we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say:   we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say:     they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say:   it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say:     they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

Jane Hirshfield, 2014