you weave through the heifers with your arms out,
palms down, barely sweeping your fingers across their
hides as if you were gliding them along grains
of wheat or stalks of tall grass, with careful footsteps
as if only you know the way through the hay and straw
(the way you look at me says that there's a difference)

sometime at one or two am you are out walking among them
again, and they all rise with their burdened bodies, swishing
their tails and swaying from side to side with their engorged
bellies, softly groaning and parting. You are some sort of holy
man, they're smart, they know when to move, you say. But
I think differently, there's something in your body--a gentleness
that emanates softly, a warm light that cuts the denim coats and
steel-toed boots, you're hard but your voice comes out in this
southern sing-song that makes my chest ache, ears red and a
laugh as rare as normal midwest weather.

you don't mind, do you? and you fall into the recliner next to me
It doesn't feel the least bit wrong to sleep next to you, doesn't feel the
least bit right to let you do it because i can feel your heart swelling
through your carhartt, don't like to look at you when you're
leaning into the side door, because the sun does you some sort of
righteous justice, spilling into your irises--streaking through your
lips when you speak as if ending every sentence with I dunno is the gospel itself.


just let me know when you make up your mind
the inconsistency of it all doesn't fall on you, I realize,
once again choking on my own insufferable selfishness
not brave enough to make the right decisions (probably)
convincing myself that things can just work out as if
the most wrinkled material doesn't need an iron, needs some steam
needs more than that's just the way I am, this is just the way
you are, and here I am tortured by the thought of telling you
to shut up, how can you have pricked my heart and
still be
So far
Away

In the quandary the future holds for us now, that climatic extremes become exponentially more extreme, that deterioration of the natural order of things accelerates to the point where mankind can no longer comfortably exist, where rising coastlines inundate dramatically and inexorably, where food can no longer be grown on the Eastern side of the nation, where the western side of the nation is inundated with continuous rainfall, where land values plummet on one side of the nation and soar on the other, where the population is forced to flee unwillingly, screaming outrage, from one area to saturate another. That social disorder breeds the seeds of revolution in the face of the chaotic inequities being suffered at the hands of governments no longer capable of coping with it all.

The sage words of Sir David Attenborough echo down the corridor of sudden shuddering inevitability in that the scenario described above pertains to NOW not further down the track, not to some distant future….it pertains to our brittle, susceptible world of NOW!

Environmental analysts are screaming the message that deep ice sheet temperatures are rising dramatically, glacial thicknesses reducing forcing mass calving into warming oceans. Oceanic salinity is reducing and oceanic current velocities and directions of mass flow are radically changing with catastrophic effect on weather patterns globally.
Ionosphere particulates and mass atmospheric pollution is changing the nature of our skies, increasingly they metastasize to phenomenon’s of extreme which flail oceans and land mass with violence and unprecedented wrath.

In 1997 the Kyoto Conference conferred, (with a sense of great nobility), in that 90% of the nations of the world were represented and agreed, after exhaustive debate, on a programme of emission control and environmental conservation….they all congratulated themselves and each other on the intention of the monumental climatic task ahead…..and went back to their home shores and did precisely NOTHING!
After paying lip service to the great speeches made, after preening themselves with the glowing mantle of adopted environmental responsibility, they went back to their respective governments and conceded to immense political pressures and kick backs of Big Oil, Big Money and the Banks.
Political concessions had to be made for GROWTH, ideology was cast aside for the immediacy of Nationally urgent issues…. MONEY….the economic necessities of the moment…(In time we will get around to the Kyoto crap and that irritating child, Greta Thunberg)!
In Truth…..
The responsibility lies with the main polluters, China, India, USA, Russia, Europe, Japan and Brazil. All unwilling to acknowledge, all unwilling to submit to the pain of real emission control. All unwilling to realistically unite to combat the environmental Armageddon, now, at their doorstep.
Russia, for example, is more willing to start a war with neighboring Ukraine, killing thousands of fellow Slavs, brutally destroying infrastructure and priceless artifacts, sending millions to flee in terror to the West……instead of dealing with the monster in the room of thawing permafrost over the vast steppes of Siberia or combating the enormous sinkholes that are occurring with profusion in the East of that land. China will not communicate productively on environmental matters with the West despite rampant, continuous air pollution in Beijing and the problematic encroachment of desertification from the West. Brazil allows the systematic felling and burning of vast areas of its rain forest annually for the development of commercial palm oil plantations… thus destroying forever a significant amount of what represents the lungs of the planet, the Amazon rain forest.

The planet will force the issue, it is applying an in-ignorable  force now….EVERYWHERE…..ISN’T IT?

The two primary polluters must come together to show the way, The USA and China have to get into lockstep, forget their combative ideology’s, forget their nuclear standoff, Come together as survivalists…for that is what they are. Formulate an immediate plan to combat the atmospheric pollution, the runaway acidification of the expanding oceans, the steady implacable rise of the temperature of the air we breathe. Combine their technological and monetary wealth to develop new research into the immediate replacement of fossil fuels………If they achieve this, the rest of the planet must fall into place behind them, they have no choice. But the Big Guns must first, SHOW THE WAY!
TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!
If this does not happen, the words of the wise, Sir David Attenborough will apply……THEN, WE, HUMANITY AS A CIVILIZATION, SHALL END!

M.
Foxglove@Taranaki, NZ