Ground Level
July 7 2014


The unsettled weather
of the last few years
has me wondering what normal was.

And of the curse, the blessing
may you live in interesting times.
With its wearying lesson
of humility, and dread.

Unprecedented cold, this winter.
When snow fell, and stayed,
accumulating
compressing under its weight.

How a glacier begins, incrementally,
homes disappearing

in silent drifts,
then forever iced-in

And summer rains, in wind-whipped torrents
too fast for roads to drain,

low-lying land, laked-over.

I thought of the Biblical flood,
and the righteous man, tasked by God
to select who lived
would not.

His creation destroyed
by our hand, our greed.
Our apathy, at least.

But now, green growing things
are over-taking my world,
a warm wet June
knee-deep in weeds.
And the air thick with bugs
who may out-live us all.

So will it end
a planet locked in ice,
a brilliant point of light

in the cosmos' freezing void?

Or verdant, smothered,
a steamy jungle, strangled by giant vines?

And at ground level
a dead dark desert.
Extreme weather
is the new normal;
I forget what came before.


Climate change is bringing extreme weather. I feel whip-sawed, day-to-day and season-to-season.

The planet will survive, of course -- only a super-nova or cosmic burst will do it in. But it will be deeply changed: its biological diversity diminished to jelly-fish and cockroaches; or life extinguished entirely. And our brief civilization a forgotten footnote, where even its material remnants are barely legible.

I mentioned apathy and greed; but I should also have mentioned stupidity and wilful ignorance.

The reference to God is a bit mischievous. I am, after all, a committed atheist. It's a jab at the Biblical fundamentalists/literalists, among whom are numerous climate-change deniers.

I think they are rendered complacent by their misplaced faith in a benign and all-knowing God. Or limited by their mistaken belief in the exalted place in creation presumably conferred on mankind: created in His image and given dominion, after all(!)

So while I grant the believers "His creation", I hope to imply that by "dominion", we are meant to be its stewards, not its exploiters.

(But my generosity is sorely strained, and in the end I couldn't resist the cheap shot at a "loving" and righteous God:   who doesn't hesitate to kill, or to assign collective guilt.)

My apologies to the entomologists, who quite rightly insist on "insect". Rhyme and cadence dictate the technically inaccurate "bug".

The original title was The New Normal. Another alternative was May You Live in Interesting Times. But Ground Level seemed more tantalizingly cryptic. ("Level" also sets off the opening rhyme, resonating nicely with "unsettled" and "weather"; not to mention the short "e" of "blessing" and "lesson".) Here, it refers to the understory of a tropical (or, for that matter, temperate) rainforest, where little light penetrates and the soil is relatively unproductive. I like the idea of a rich verdant planet that has no place for such undeserving ground-dwelling creatures as us. And the call-back to the title in the closing stanza gives added weight to its bleakly prescient "dead dark desert."

This piece is a rare departure, because I assiduously avoid writing poems about public policy. I think that's where the essay form excels, and poetry fails. (And deep down, I'm much more essayist than poet. Poetry is for me more of a discipline and a challenge than any natural inclination.) No reader wants to plod through poetry that seems political or propagandistic. And it's frustrating as the writer, because in a good poem I can't be as comprehensive, sequential, and argumentative as the topic demands: that is, say and explain everything I want. Not in the way an essay is so neat and clear: how a good one says what you're going to say, says it, and then says what you said.

Although it helps knowing I can elaborate and drill down deeper, “blurbing” (an acceptable verb?) like this. Having that outlet allows me to focus on imagery, narrative, and sound without feeling as obligated by the rigour of ideas. I can enter into the poem free to distil down my thinking:  to select what’s truly important, to say it simply, and to be unafraid of feeling and emotion.