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apocalypse, art, climate change, culture, Deborah J. Brasket, future, humanity, Nature, poem, poetry, Survival, Trumpism, United States
Once Upon a Time, A Poem
In an eon, will Trumpism portend another Troy, a Trojan horse whose armies eviscerated a City of light?
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?
Will 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?
Will tiny children perched in trees suckle strange fruit, while 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 Eagle with its soaring eye see us? Will we see it? And remember how
The long, slow, widening arcs of its wings drew round us, once up a time, so long ago.
Deborah J. Brasket, 2021
Illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith from the fairy tale Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, 1862
Deborah J. Brasket 
Vivid painting and post title!! Scary to think that we all end up as stories and memories. Could you please identify the painting and the artist underneath in italics? The image reminds me of both Jorie Graham’s vividly beautiful poem, Salmon, and Leonard Cohen’s hauntingly beautiful song, Suzanne.
Excerpt from Salmon by Jorie Graham
I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room half-way through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty.,
archaic,
not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper
into less. They leapt up falls, ladders,
and rock, tearing and leaping, a gold river,
and a blue river traveling
in opposite directions.
Excerpt from Suzanne by Leonard Cohen
There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror
Why not submit your poem to The New Yorker? They just might publish it.
Thanks for sharing.
Ken
Thank you, Ken. It’s an illustration by Jessica Wilcox Smith from the fairy tale Waterbabies, one of my favorites, set in verse. Thanks too for the salmon poem by Graham, powerful images! And also Cohen’s song, I love his music. I’ll have to check this one out. Not sure about the New Yorker. I’ve discovered I don’t have the patience to submit poetry for publication. I’d rather just get it out here. And let people share it if they like it.
I double checked, it’s Jessie Wilcox Smith, and Water Babies written by Charles Kingsley in 1862, a beautiful love story about a little rich girl and a chimney sweep helper.
Thanks for the Water Babies connection. I thought the same thing as I wrote the suggestion of sending your poem out for publication. You’re already publishing it here on your blog in the best possible way.
Lovely poem and musings Deborah. Hopefully, we’ll be swimming and flying with the creatures rather than a distant story. But sometimes I find solace in the notion of earth cleansing herself of humans and thriving again.
Thanks, Brad. I felt that too as I was writing this, an earth renewing itself. But even so there’s so much beauty and heroism in our humanity I’d like to believe that it would be captured somehow in the earth’s renewal.
I like your perspective.
So, it’s not enough you’re mastering painting–you’ve got to nail poetry, too? Wonderful poem.
Haha, I wish! Thank you though, Andrea. I’ve been writing poetry since I was a child, but not so much this past decade. Lately though some of my post ideas have been been coming out sounding more like poetry than prose, so I’ve been nurturing it into verse form. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Beautiful words and image
Thank you, Elizabeth!
I read your previous posts as suggested at the end of this one (2017/04/09/poetry-the-thing-we-die-for-lack-of and 2014/12/28/a-cranky-reader-what-i-crave-when-i-read-poetry).
Poetry has been saving my sanity since around September 2020…I discovered this website you might be interested in, too.
https://onbeing.org/starting-points/
Stay sane. Stay safe.
Thanks, Laura. Poetry is a wonderful way to distill experience and feelings to its essence.