In Admiration and Support of Climate Frontliners

There’s something about fog over a prairie slough,
the way it lies down and stretches
right over the cattails around the edges,
like a cotton compress over an open wound.

The world, the whole wide world,
needs such a fog, cleansing, healing,
then lifting, revealing new skin,
blue as a hatched bird’s belly
and shiny as a dolphin
breaching on a Pacific horizon,
under a rainbow scar.

It’s like what God had in mind, that business
with the flood. Major housecleaning.
Take everything away, God thought,
and they’ll come back wanting something different.
Lesson not learned, says
wildfire pandemic,
says ruthless economics.

Looks like we’ve mistaken our adolescence
for adulthood, and our Mother’s gifts for commodities,
appears we’ll manage our own decimation,
if not annihilation,
just fine.

We of the sputtering eidos; wicks
guttering out in the ornamental pools at the plaza;
we of the lost ethos, wandering about
like Carthusian monks in an airport.

Thankfully, there are those among us who still seek
directions; who make colour copies,
with tear-off phone numbers, of our lost planet —
that first photograph taken from space —
and staple them to street posts around town;
who send out doves, ravens, desert bats,
and wait for a fresh plucked olive leaf.

Mercifully, there are those among us who still live
for the sake of others, who rise every morning
to pay what we owe the child coming after us,
and so help the earth metabolize its grief
and restore to our once good globe
a portion of its peace and wildness.

It should put the lot of us on hold,
quieting our boats, listening anew for whale song,
quitting our combustion and turning around 
to watch through scud clouds
for a flash of wing.