What is there to lose?
Ice shelves slip their ancient moorings.
A patch of sea ice lingers north of Greenland.
What is the weight of water?
Wind howls from somewhere south of desire,
fans fires. Continents burn.
Rainforests succumb.
Three trillion trees turn to ash.
Nature's species begin a forced migration.
No one will take them in.
It has not yet been called genocide.
Fourteen million Africans rest
on starvation's brink.
Barren clouds drift in
and out of sight,
grass crunches underfoot,
shimmers in a sepia landscape.
Everyone prays for rain,
mouths open to the sky.
What is there to lose?
Whooping cranes suffer memory loss,
their migratory paths obscured by clear-cut.
Dolphin assesses unexpected redundancy, dies
nuzzling his trainer's hand.
Elephant, hobbled to metal stake,
allows a tear to run the length of wrinkled cheek.
Polar bear searches for a resting place,
floats, belly to the sky.
Oceans drink carbon dioxide,
gorge on 10 billion metric tons
each year.
Shellfish bones decalcify
in the acid bath.
Coral reefs bleach white,
and die.
The human shadow grows
a little longer.
The body contains fifteen dioxins, thirty-three
volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds, lead, mercury
furans, PC's, organochlorine pesticides,
polybrominated flame retardants, phthalates.
We reject learning languages
unfamiliar to the tongue.
Singleness of vision rolls
to its other side,
believes mutability does not exist.
We dream only what is lost.
Earth grows restless in its sleep,
begins to remember
these are symptoms it has felt before,
so long ago, so out of mind --
mass extinctions, forgotten by history:
five times
but not like this.
What is there to lose?
