Pride Month, and other Haibun - 16. Fire and Brimstone

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Fire and Brimstone

Haibun

There was a time when nine hundred fifty thousand new car registrations were issued in Beijing a day; but that was twenty years ago when a difference could have been made; when most of those cars could have been electric or hydrogen, or something else clean. But that boat has sailed with belching black exhaust, and now who knows how many new dino-juice vehicles are put on the road every twenty-four hours. Soon, maybe they will even burn coal.

As the crystal blue

of the glaciers turns water,

the azure sky browns.

◇ ◇ ◇

It was many years ago now that I first became aware of the blindness most people have concerning air quality. A Berlitz calendar in fact woke me up to it. International in its scope, one month was gifted with a picture of the row of windmills outside of Amsterdam. It’s a place I have been, so was shocked to see the printed photograph featured the structures against an orange-brown, smog laden background. How could they not have seen it; how they look at this nightmare picture and see it as ‘lovely.’

To have live this long and now know

my generation’s the last one

to have seen the world with blue skies

unfiltered yellow by the sun.

Our eyes were the last to witness

the horizons unpolluted

by tons of manmade waste air-borne

to make each ray brown and muted.

Now, unknown, the kids look around

and think soupy particulates

‘beautiful’ in their ignorance,

praising the ugliness of their wits.

And so my five decades of life

prepare to fade to a sunset,

mourning how it’s far too late

to tip back and somehow re-get

The blue skies of my youth for us

when nothing stops the pollution

and no Power brooks compromise

to reach the needed solution.

So in my head the sight will die

of a world blessed with her blue skies

when my body ceases to live,

and I take them with me as sighs.

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But, as for the calendar, I shrugged it off as a one-time myopia. Shrugged the feeling that such images were not going to be regarded as ‘the way things are.’ But then, in one of the Star Wars movies, a foreign paradise was illustrated as smog choked and putrid in atmosphere, and I thought — well, made in Hollywood, they know no better. It’s the air they live and breathe in. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

The seven last words

of the climate death throes

“How could you….

“How could you…

“How…?”

◇ ◇ ◇

All despair now seems appropriate. This is how I felt last year when a new kids’ series featuring the Snoopy and Charlie Brown characters in televised adventures used as backgrounds not lovely, simple, natural blue skies — but orange-brown, smog-sickened pollution-vomited welkins for the Peanut kids to walk and talk in. There is no hope; there are no blue skies in humankind’s future anymore. Not when our species looks around and sees a manmade fire and brimstone atmosphere but thinks “How pretty.”

I’ll die among the last

to have ever breathed free

in Earth’s blue-skied paradise.

To have a brain is to want

things natural again;

to have a soul is to

pity the mess we’ve made

of the place we call home

and not even know.

~

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