{This is a response to What Pegman Saw. We are in Greenland this week. I made a pun of it, and hope you will enjoy this poem. It touches on what must, or, at least, should, be serious business, if you happen to live in Greenland–or in Florida, for that matter! The picture is from a local hardware store, not from Greenland.}
A block of ice
On a hot sidewalk:
Who could guess, what this would bring?
But a glacier, mounting
An island’s girth,
Could give birth to anything.
A breeze escapes
From its polar cell,
Coating all the North with ice.
The shoreline creeps.
Overflowing wells
Make us wonder, blink, think twice.
And the winds, they whip;
And the tides crest high,
Far above the hundred-year;
And we run the data,
And wonder why;
Wonder what we’re doing here.
And the snows blow cold;
And the breeze grows hot;
And the forests burn and smoke.
And we long for the calm
Of the white sea-dove,
When the deluge ends.
God spoke.
But we hearkened not,
Though he spoke our tongue:
Full of facts and numbered charts.
We will pay, one day,
When the deluge comes,
And the green, green land departs.
Copyright 2019 Andrea LeDew
For more about green locations, check out The Green Revolution and My Green Isle.
A foretelling, farsighted well constructed piece of poetry. A goo d rythmic feel.
Thank you John! We’ll just have to wait and see how true my predictions turn out to be!
A poem may help us where facts and numbered charts fail us. Well done writing one; I hope your work influences the thoughts and actions of those who read it.
Thanks Penny.
A sobering but wonderfully written poem, Andrea. I suspect we will survive for a good while longer, though fewer of us, probably. You never know, we can be very smart and ingenious at thinking our way out of problems if we have to. But the planet will survive us and that gives me some hope for the future.
And that planting is fantastic
Thank you regarding the poem and the I will pass along your compliments on the planting! Didn’t mean to be an End-of-times-er on this one, but sometimes poems and stories come out differently than you expect. I’m pretty optimistic too. I just think inaction might be a bit risky.
Oh, and just to tease you, despite your protestations of confidence in mankind, “probably fewer of us” speaks to a somewhat grimmer version of the future. Id be interested in reading your version of this gentle apocalypse. ?
Powerful and true. My favorite lines: “Though he spoke our tongue:
Full of facts and numbered charts.”
I try to keep hopeful that we will solve/stop this. We saved the bald eagles from the brink of extinction, after all. We can be wise and wonderful when we want to.
True! If not solve, at least, find a peaceful way to adapt to whatever changes may come.
Great pacing to this piece. I like the message, too.
Thank you Josh. I think I was channeling James Whitcomb Riley’s “Little Orphant Annie:”
“Er the Gobble-uns ‘ll git you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!”?
One of your best! (But then, I always enjoy your poems.) And–impressive work by your daughter!
So happy you enjoyed it! And I am so proud of her abilities, both horticultural and artistic!
Dear Andrea,
And we aren’t listening still…perhaps we never will. Well done.
Shalom,
Rochelle
Yes this has a kind of regretful tone, a shaking of one’s head at the tragedy, and a pondering on what one might have done. I’m flattered by the comparison to the wrenching song “Vincent” by Don MacLean (starry Starry Night.)
I guess you could say, at a stretch, that this poem describes the potential, for a kind of species “suicide” by environment, through inaction and neglect…
I hope we fare better than that, in our “struggle(s) for (our) sanity.”⛈??
Beautiful!! Love the imagery!
Thank you! How many banana peels did I earn??