The Warm Up (poem) re: Friday's Climate Strike

Here’s a draft of a brief poem written off-the-cuff in response to, and in support of, yesterday’s climate strikes principally by high-school students around the globe. Self-publishing this one feels nearly right to me because of the urgency around this action, and its on-the-ground politics. So.

The Warm Up

An adolescent tide, a human tide

washes—no, spills—into the public squares           

and common spaces of their killed planet,

our culpable and shared and broken earth.

Swells of DIY placards, stubby memes

magic-markered onto rescued cardboard

and bristol board repurposed from blue bins,

call out the dire, decrepit quietude

of preemptive middle age: change your life,

change your life. A hoarse, electric chorus

of shouts and bullhorns rises, crowd-sourcing

raw, fierce unction. Who sutures the world’s wounds?

There’s no coming back from extinction, obvs.

Show us how to march the torn line between

what can be done and what can’t be undone.

Skolstrejk for Klimatet, Vancouver and elsewhere, 27 September 2019

Mount Everest Deaths (Poem)

I have been reading about the death-toll on Mount Everest, and seen the photograph (in The Guardian, here and here) of the current human traffic jam at the summit, trying to push upward, sometimes stepping over the bodies of other dead climbers. This piece, this poem, emerged for me as a commentary on the news, and of thinking about the inhuman and about certain forms of eco-tourism and terrible sublimity emerging in the accelerated epoch now named the Anthropocene. A hybrid sonnet came out, in fives and sixes. I want to put it up on this blog because of the immediacy and the temporality of its subject matter. It was composed and edited over about three days.

Tourist Climbers, Mount Everest, Nepal Side, Late May 2019 

(See the Photograph by Nirmal Purja)

Triumphantly inadequate: out of ten-plus

amateurs, permits intact, who’d expire 

in a crammed mass ascent through the kill zone this week, 

most, chuffed with so much third-hand hubris, got 

sucker-punched by the hypoxic sublime. Sure, sure,

a blue-balling few summited, but only

to crumple along the first leg of the slog down.

         (People stepped over them, stiffened. A line 

of down-filled anoraks snaked its impacted track

         up the crown ridge, strewn with used O₂ tanks,

marking a slow-witted hokey-pokey topward.

You choose to bend and help, you don’t make it.)

No cliff jockey returns from this fierce place unscarred,

having clomped past the air’s inhuman edge.