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    AC Benus
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Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 

June, 2020 – Hell in a Handbasket - 3. Part Three: But Where Will We Live…

*

Part Three:

But Where Will We Live…

 

XV.

How long the day of reckoning

Has hounded our every footfall,

While we thought the shopping easy –

And the chosen choices could stall

Payment on a bill whose interest

Would cost our kids their very all –

 

We went on indulging the same,

Like Times had not caused our repine,

Forked tongues saying greed was harmless,

But minds knowing the check-out time

To give Nature’s owed pound of flesh

Fast approached to pay for our crime.

 

So now, with the world on fire

From Siberia to Brazil;

From Patagonia to Perth;

With Dust-Bowl dryness on our sill,

We walk and complain of the heat

Knowing the worst’s yet to come still.

 

 

XVI.

An enraged Earth plays flame-tag with itself,

Saying in thunder and tossed-aside embers

From asshole humans and their lit cigarettes,

“You shall burn for this! You shall die fittingly.”

 

And so, fire touched upon the tinder dry,

Storms and licks and leaps over quickening winds

To decimate first the Northern Hemisphere

All through its long half-year furnace summers.

 

And then, this fire touched in tinder dry

Storms and licks and leaps without a pausing rest

To decimate too the Southern Hemisphere

All through its long half-year oven summers.

 

Temperance gone, the North Star sheds a tear in smoke,

But it’s only the orange tinge of pollution

We tell each other is “charming” at sunsets,

Knowing the brown coal-smog signals Man’s sunset.

 

The Southern Cross appears to drip tears of blood

From the starry crown of satellites one man’s

Allowed to link, like a fishing net of death,

To rob the dying even of a clear sky.

 

Therefore, an Earth enraged shuttles the planchette

Above continents, like a cruel boy using

A magnifying glass to set ants on fire –

Only the “ants” are preserves, fields and forests.

 

She spells out a mighty Ouija damnation,

For it will all go: Yosemite and Muir Woods;

The remnant margins of the Once-Amazon;

The well-raped and cleared teak lands of Borneo;

 

Siberia; Canada; Japan; China;

The Middle East; Australia; Europe; Belize;

South Asia; North America; Germany;

And every other refuge for Man will go.

 

The world’s empirically on fire, while we fiddle.

Time’s up. We’ve had our chance, now Nature demands

Our pieces be removed from this world’s chessboard,

Laughing flames when we cry, “But…where will we live…!”

 

 

XVII.

Damn our constant thirst for “Good News!”

If it’s good news you want

How about giant viruses

Revived from permafrost –

Each Pleistocene-sized and dormant

Thirty-five thousand years –

But now global warming melts them

And they spring back to life.

 

There’s some of your “Good News!”

 

Then there’s the Pacific Northwest

Where another headline,

For June-2020 readers,

Proclaims micro-plastic

Burned up as Asian pollution

Rains down now by the tons

To smother the Cascade Forests

To the point of their death.

 

There’s some of your “Good News!”

 

Don’t forget the Dump-heads changing

Sovereign Alaskan law

So Donny Dump Junior can shoot

All the bear cubs he wants –

OR, the Conservation Officer

Fired in Canada

For refusing to shoot bear cubs

Whose mother he’d already killed.

 

Had enough of your “Good News”

 

 

XVIII.

 

HYMN

 

Global Warming, God’s gift to Man –

Now one hundred thirty-five-degree days

Can force a mad migration to The North,

As a billion Indians try to breathe.

 

Now a hundred fifty-degree days

Can roast the poor out of the Gulf States,

While the Rich’s AC adds to the sweat.

 

Global Warming, Man’s gift to God –

Now locust swarms, vaster than fields of rice,

Can return Biblical Times to people

And fill up the opium-parlor churches.

 

Down on your knees, you hopeless feckless God;

The Dollar, Greed and Death are the truest

Trinity since we’ve gone over the brink.

 

Global Warming, just some Fake News –

Death and Destruction’s Art has fooled us all,

At least as it’s advertised in public,

Despite what is known in our heart of hearts.

 

It’s more comfortable to believe a lie

Totally unworthy of any faith,

Save the one that says “You must keep what’s yours.”

 

Amen.

 

 

_

Copyright © 2020 AC Benus; All Rights Reserved.
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Poetry posted in this category are works of fiction. Names, places, characters, events, and incidents are created by the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual persons (living or dead), organizations, companies, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you. 
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Dear AC, I want to thank you for those poems. It's a gift to be able to find words and craft art to make those topics aware. Sometimes I really doubt`t my decision to have children in this world of destruction. Everything you called out are topics, which follow me since I was in school. Wow, that is really long ago and I don't have the feeling, that we as humans made the progress, we intelligent species should have. In the last three years, I watch the area I live in getting more dry, wildfires destroying the forest and munition from the WW II exploding in those burning forests. Firefighter can not go there, its far too dangerous. Plastic in the ocean, what does separate plastic in the trash brings, when there is no recycling but selling it to other poorer countries instead. Out of my eyes out of my thoughts…. a stupid strategy. There is so much more to be aware of and I so appreciate that you write about it, so that people become aware. We talked about, how to bring those over your friends. But what if you would not bring them out? If nobody speaks out loud about it. Everything you said, is so true and every emotion you have about it is real and justified. You say it out loud for yourself, for your friends, for my kids (which I know, you care about) so that maybe one day humans come to think and there might be a slight little possebility to safe us. Fazit: The world -- we -- need more of your brilliant poems. Please bring them to us! Muha A.

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I read these and weep. I weep for all the chances missed, the treasures squandered, the brightness dimmed. I weep for us in our thirst and hunger, our blindness and fear, and ruled by apocalyptically poor leaders. 
Will the tears ever end?

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These poems are a harsh reminder of how much humans have squandered the treasures of our planet. It is dreadful that too often the warnings fall on deaf ears. If in the middle of a pandemic many people refuse to wear a mask for their own safety and for others, how can we expect them to take steps to reverse our impact on the Earth before it is too late. Thanks. 

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22 hours ago, Lyssa said:

Dear AC, I want to thank you for those poems. It's a gift to be able to find words and craft art to make those topics aware. Sometimes I really doubt`t my decision to have children in this world of destruction. Everything you called out are topics, which follow me since I was in school. Wow, that is really long ago and I don't have the feeling, that we as humans made the progress, we intelligent species should have. In the last three years, I watch the area I live in getting more dry, wildfires destroying the forest and munition from the WW II exploding in those burning forests. Firefighter can not go there, its far too dangerous. Plastic in the ocean, what does separate plastic in the trash brings, when there is no recycling but selling it to other poorer countries instead. Out of my eyes out of my thoughts…. a stupid strategy. There is so much more to be aware of and I so appreciate that you write about it, so that people become aware. We talked about, how to bring those over your friends. But what if you would not bring them out? If nobody speaks out loud about it. Everything you said, is so true and every emotion you have about it is real and justified. You say it out loud for yourself, for your friends, for my kids (which I know, you care about) so that maybe one day humans come to think and there might be a slight little possebility to safe us. Fazit: The world -- we -- need more of your brilliant poems. Please bring them to us! Muha A.

Thank you, Lyssa, for your comments and support. When it comes to the environmental sections of this work, which represent a third of the total, I have lived with and suppressed these thoughts and feelings for a long time. There are possibly few alive now who even remember George Bush Sr. ran in 1988 on a double social platform. His burning lies of "I want to be the environmental president. I want to be the educational president" are laughable in hindsight. When he got in office, he turned out to want to be the CIA operative president, and the sic the IRS on the working class American president. The first ambition he showed by sending American soldiers all over the world to die for his view of a World Police Force -- Somalia, Haiti, Panama, and of course Iraq. Second was the betrayal of average Americans by Bush paying for his wars by establishing draconian quotas for each IRS auditor to meet monthly -- so many hundreds of poor and honest people audited, some of them year after year, made to pay nick-picking "fines" for doing nothing wrong. (Why the working-class targeted? Because at the same time King Bush I was cutting taxes of the super rich, like him.) But in terms of education and the environment: as soon as he got in, he gutted the Educations Department's budget, forcing the ending of HS programs across the country (like science and drama clubs, and especially -- music). As for the environment, he flat out refused to support the Kyoto Environmental Protocol, forbidding Congress from exercising their duties as treaty reviewers and ratifiers. 

Why do I mention it, now? Because if in 1991 we had done the necessary thing and led the world in environmental matters, everyone alive today would be able to breathe easier. Instead, an oilman like that Bushy wimp never had any intentions at all of being anyone's "environmental president." It was easy to see his betrayals would make him the one-term footnote of history he deserves. 

[[more to come...]]        

Edited by AC Benus
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On 6/23/2020 at 12:42 PM, Lyssa said:

Dear AC, I want to thank you for those poems. It's a gift to be able to find words and craft art to make those topics aware. Sometimes I really doubt`t my decision to have children in this world of destruction. Everything you called out are topics, which follow me since I was in school. Wow, that is really long ago and I don't have the feeling, that we as humans made the progress, we intelligent species should have. In the last three years, I watch the area I live in getting more dry, wildfires destroying the forest and munition from the WW II exploding in those burning forests. Firefighter can not go there, its far too dangerous. Plastic in the ocean, what does separate plastic in the trash brings, when there is no recycling but selling it to other poorer countries instead. Out of my eyes out of my thoughts…. a stupid strategy. There is so much more to be aware of and I so appreciate that you write about it, so that people become aware. We talked about, how to bring those over your friends. But what if you would not bring them out? If nobody speaks out loud about it. Everything you said, is so true and every emotion you have about it is real and justified. You say it out loud for yourself, for your friends, for my kids (which I know, you care about) so that maybe one day humans come to think and there might be a slight little possebility to safe us. Fazit: The world -- we -- need more of your brilliant poems. Please bring them to us! Muha A.

I suppose the truly demented thing is realizing kids get it, and will do whatever it takes to conserve our environment. The tragedy is when this faith to action gets whittled down little by little by adults. If the children took over the world in ecological matters, then we would be in good hands :) Thank you for your comments, Lyssa

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On 6/23/2020 at 5:43 PM, Parker Owens said:

I read these and weep. I weep for all the chances missed, the treasures squandered, the brightness dimmed. I weep for us in our thirst and hunger, our blindness and fear, and ruled by apocalyptically poor leaders. 
Will the tears ever end?

Thank you, Parker. The time I spend on this series of poems may not be able to do anything, but personally, it's a cathartic purge to get these thoughts down on paper and of my head. Thank you for reading and commenting   

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On 6/23/2020 at 10:54 PM, JeffreyL said:

These poems are a harsh reminder of how much humans have squandered the treasures of our planet. It is dreadful that too often the warnings fall on deaf ears. If in the middle of a pandemic many people refuse to wear a mask for their own safety and for others, how can we expect them to take steps to reverse our impact on the Earth before it is too late. Thanks. 

Thank you, Jeffery. Oh, you mention the mask thing, and I think it's reprehensible how the Right has taken something as simple as health recommendations and politicized them. To what end? The to the end that their own adherents die for a non-political matter of basic protection...? That these people's kids die for Vixen 'New's privately-funded agenda of making poor people pay for fat-cats to permanently rule over them...? Don't get it. (sorry. tirade...)

But thank you again for your comment and offering me support.

Edited by AC Benus
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