With all the wildfires, floods, and extreme heat waves going on, it seems the climate catastrophe we heard was coming is already upon us.

Don’t say we weren’t warned, writes Hirshfield in her poem below. We were.

Do 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.

by Jane Hirshfield, 2014

I wrote another poem warning of the dire consequences that could follow if we failed to act after the 2016 presidential election, knowing Trump was a Climate denier, and worried about the damage he would do on his watch.

Now, after he’s returned and has appointed 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.

Once Upon a Time in America

In eons hence, after Trump’s Trojan horse eviscerated a City of Light, and oceans rose and civilizations fell,
Will America 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.

by Deborah J. Brasket, 2016

I came across the following poem by Maria Popova recently on her website The Marginalian. It starts out just as bleak as the ones above, and maybe more so, for it speaks of the end of our universe, not just America or the Earth. And yet its title and its ending ring an uplifting note that gives balm to all of these portending tragedies we fear, and even to our own eventual and personal demise.

Despite all that may be lost, what we have while it lasts is so astoundingly beautiful and miraculous, so full of grace and awe, that one has to wonder if it ever (if we ever) can truly be lost. If all this sprang into being once, why not again and again?

It’s a reminder to hold onto what we have in the here and now, to truly cherish it, to save it if we can, to mourn its passing if we can’t, but to never allow the fear of what may be lost rob us of its raw power to stir us with its presence.

But We Had Music

Right this minute
across time zones and opinions
people are
making plans
making meals
making promises and poems

while

at the center of our galaxy
a black hole with the mass of
four billion suns
screams its open-mouth kiss
     of oblivion.

Someday it will swallow
Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations,
swallow calculus and Leaves of Grass.

I know this.

And still
when the constellation of starlings
flickers across the evening sky,
it is     enough

to stand here
for an irrevocable minute
     agape with wonder.

It is     eternity.

by Maria Popova

For us, today, if we live long enough, we can tell our grandchildren and greats how we once stood agape in wonder at the marvels we were blessed with: Once we had whales and rain forests. We had polar bears and coral reefs. We had Monarch Butterflies and Golden Toads.

Once we had a welcoming hospitable planet where oceans didn’t swallow seaside cities, and floods didn’t drown waving wheat fields.

Once the sun did not turn meadows filled with wildflowers to dust. Nor did tyrants turn away families fleeing from famine and gunfire.

Why say all these dire things? Because we do not want to say we were not warned. And we do not want to forget the wonders that were lost.

We do not want to say: once there was poetry, once there was music, once there were people who cared enough to warn us, but no more.

Not while we are still alive. While we have breath to tell the tale. Breath enough to breathe the music and breathe the poetry into a world that has such a dire need to hear it.

This kind of elegiac poetry is not meant to mourn what could be lost, but to remember how precious and valuable it still is, and to rouse us to greater valor in our fight to save what we love.

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

I chose this illustration because it depicts the strangeness of the situation we seem to find ourselves, or will in time, where the fish (representing Nature) looks aghast at the boy (representing us), who through greed and neglect raised the seas to levels where they could swim freely through our drowned cities.

And the boy, wearing gills, our future children, represents the hope that they will adapt in ways to survive the planet we leave them.