planet

March 11, 2023

ACCESSIBILITY

Technology has afforded those of us
with impairments the ability
to more fully participate
in the world around us.

However we can never lose sight,
a painful use of the phrase
in my case, of its imperfections.

Perhaps it is merely anticipating
the future of our species, as when
the phones captioning decided
a somewhat elided Marsha and Barry
was in fact Martian berries.
As crazy as that seems at first,
looking around at how we
have laid waste to this planet
exobiology and exobotany
may be the last and only
hope for our species, but
I do wonder how they will taste.

March 8, 2023

THE OLD ROCKER

I reached the point in life
where I know the Byrds were right,
I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now, and
for good measure Jethro Tull knew
I was too old to rock ‘n’ roll
but far too young to die.
And yet I am still inchoate,
a product of the Big Bang, stellar
dust accreted temporarily.
And the Webb Space Telescope
has given me the next best thing
to immortality, for when the time comes
and I hope it isn’t all that soon,
when my body is cremated, that
momentary heat signature will
be seen in some planet in a galaxy
at the edge of the universe
some 13 billion years later,
long after my ashes will have
returned to the cosmos,
from where I came.

February 23, 2023

PAUSING

As the rivers dry up
and lakes become ponds
we are finding things we
never thought we would see.
An old warship in Europe,
dinosaur footprints, cars
and, sadly, the bones of some.
We stop momentarily to marvel
at these discoveries, then
withdraw to our homes where we
hope we can escape the heat,
our air conditioners working overtime,
the power plants strained.
Yet we never stop to think
that the day may be too soon
coming when it will be
our bones littering the landscape,
victims of our own abuse
of the planet we thought that
we held dominion over.

First published in OUR CHANGING EARTH: Vol.1. The Poet. 2023.

August 20, 2022

THE CAT

Pause and consider, if only
for a moment, this question,
which you need not answer
as you will be right and
you will be wrong regardless
of what you say in response.

What if we are the cat in
some Godly thought experiment
and our degradation of the planet
is the bit of radioactive material,
of which we have in profusion.

Are we alive, or are we dead,
or both, until God again
checks in on us, so we must
hope He is too busy creating
other worlds and correcting
the errors he made in this one.

April 15, 2022

NAMELESS ONE

It is truly unfair, sucks really,
that proximity has cast me
as nameless, yet I am forced
to wear all manner of terms
that fit their mood at any
given moment, and even then
they can’t seem to agree.

You can say it is petty, but I
am jealous of Titan, and hell
even Phobos and Deimos
have proper names, and they
are a misshapen, dim pair.
Maybe I should blame
my companion who rejected
a host of names, wanting
to be called earth, but why
do all the major planets have names
while I am tagged with,
nothing more than moon.

November 26, 2020

BANDAGE

She wants to know if it is even possible
to make a bandage large enough
to bind the wounds we have inflicted
on a planet which we were told
was ours over which we were
to exercise our wise dominion.

She says it isn’t fair that she will be
left to try to clean up the mess
that we have made for it was our
world too, though she adds, we were
not very good at sharing with others.

I want to apologize and tell her
that she is right, that we adults
have failed her generation but
I know she won’t believe me, for
we could have stopped this, but we

always looked out for ourselves
always wanted just a bit more
always were too busy to notice
assumed the others would handle it
said there was nothing we could do.

We hope one day you will
forgive us although we have done
nothing to merit any absolution.

First appeared in The Poet: A New World, Autumn 2020

November 1, 2020

LEX

Well before there was
Aristotle, there was aa,
which comes as no surprise
to geologists who never
doubted the history
and creation of
this planet.

Well after the zebra
there was the zygote,
which a biologist
would tell you
is putting the cart
well before the horse.

The lexicographer will say
that he did not create
this disconnect, for he
or she is a mere recorder,
so you’d have to go
back the the source —
if you can find
an etymologist
to lead you there.

June 20, 2020

ROUND ABOUT

The great minds in Transportation have decided
that the answer to all traffic problems
is simple, you replace troublesome intersections
with traffic circles, but you call them roundabouts.
They know that the young and wish they were
in their muscle cars will avoid them like the plague,
for even they cannot defeat centrifugal force,
and inertia is one thing they never lack.
And for the old, the plodding, either they won’t
enter the circle, or will revolve around its center
like a small planet bound tightly to its star
marking the center, and then only after they
have paused for an indeterminite period, trying
to figure out how to get in, where to get out
and wishing they had called Uber to begin with.
And I, behind them know, I can take this time
to get in a day’s meditation counting my breath.

January 5, 2020

NUMBER 9?

The truly sad thing is not
that billions were spent
on the voyage to our most distant planet
only to discover, on arrival
it wasn’t a planet at all,
merely a dwarf, a near planet
and yet there was no rebate for the downgrade.
Life is too often like that, you want a mulligan
and all they say is “no returns, no refunds.”
No one asked Charon what he thought
watching it all as he wandered about
knowing he will remain moon
for so long as there is someone, somewhere
assigning names, unless he grows bored,
breaks free and wanders off into being
a dwarf planet all his own, after all
it’s not like Styx would give a damn –
better to be a moon of the first order finally
and as for those billions, if you can’t
leave the solar system every now and again
there’s not much purpose
in escaping the atmosphere.