Audre Lorde Knows What I Mean – 2021 in review - 3. Part Three: Swan Song

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Audre Lorde Knows What I Mean –

2021 in review

by AC Benus

“When I hear of the destruction of a species,

I feel as if all the works of some great writer

has perished.”

—Theodore Roosevelt, ^[i]

February 15th, 1899

Part Three:

Environmental Collapse I

XIII.

Three Triolets on a Theme

i.

There is no freshness now left in the air

Because the wildfires have drenched it in smoke,

And over a land wasted in despair

There is no freshness now left in the air

And no one seems to even give a care

The world outside’s forced to admit and choke

There is no freshness now left in the air

Because the wildfires have drenched it in smoke.

ii.

Open windows to outside air,

For it is stifling through and through

And ash will get in if you dare

Open windows to outside air,

Because the world burns everywhere—

So choose carefully if you do

Open windows to the outside air,

For it is stifling through and through.

iii.

Here there is no breath in today’s foul air

Which windows closed or open cannot hide,

For death from the forest fires’ dark lair

Shows there is no breath in today’s foul air

Which strips the woods of life and leaves them bare

As warning that none should again reside

Where there is no breath in today’s foul air

Which windows closed or open cannot hide. [ii]

XIV.

Twenty-three, the species declared extinct,

Greets an autumn headline when we awake.

They disappeared not all at once, but now,

There’s some truth from D.C. on the Nation’s

Environmental State of the Union.

It’s a caught-up moment of sobering

Honesty for all to minimize,

Ignore, false-debate, deny, lie about

As our Big-Money Politics sees fit. [iii]

XV.

Kyrielle

The young are without hope the Earth

Can survive Man’s heartless onslaught,

For if one surveys action’s dearth,

You know they feel just as they ought

—And I, young at heart, am with them.

Everywhere they look, there’s despair,

While truth to tell, it’s in their lungs

Breathing in the sulfurous air,

Feeling it coating on their tongues

—And I, young at heart, am with them.

For decades’ worth of lip service

Has done the world’s children no good,

Except raise them sad and nervous

Their kids will hate them as they should

—And I, young at heart, am with them. [iv]

XVI.

Little Willie

Willi thought everything was nice

as he froze to death in the ice,

fumbling with his rosary beads

as if life’s a string of misdeeds.

XVII.

Why should I be shocked?—

And yet, I was.

A satellite view,

Of current times,

Clearly shows Brazil

As it is now—

A vast savanna

With rainforests

Completely wiped out.

There’s nothing now,

Save some margins on

The Amazon’s

Capillary banks.

But, do not fear—

They'll soon go as well,

For nothing stops

Mankind’s slash and burn,

Though it's our flesh

His machete strikes;

Though it's our soul

His flames plow asunder. [v]

XVIII.

Biomass, Biomass, you can’t compete

With the weight of all our manmade crap, so

Biomass, Biomass, toss us over

And let centrifugal force hurl us

Into the darkest Hell of our nightmares—

Biomass, Biomass, we can’t survive. [vi]

XIX.

How many have been the poems written

On the soothing sanctity of the rain,

And yet, in Greenland this year, it was rain

That witnessed the ice with drops be bitten.

For the first time in recorded history,

Heat made it rain steadily on the snow

And great cataracts of runoff to flow,

While the cause of it was no mystery.

Past the point of a shot across the bow,

What this winter was, unprecedented,

Will happen every year unprevented

As the ‘way it is’ in the here and now.

No use to seek wisdom where’er it stands,

For our doomsday strides unstopped through the lands. [vii]

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