Dome - June 29 2021

 

Dome

June 29 2021

They're calling it a dome

instead of a wave.

Not a passing surge, but permanent,

as if immovable

looming overhead.

Days on end

over 40 C

and wild fires rage.

Hot humid air

and nights without relief.

30 would be fine, they said

and I think that just a few more degrees

and this planet is unlivable.

We are fragile as is,

slow thin-skinned creatures

with no claws and timid teeth

who survive by our wits.

Under an atmosphere

just the right thickness,

on a earth

in a roughly even orbit

the perfect distance from the sun.

Vary it a bit

and we are done for.

Out of Africa

and as far as the poles.

All of it home.

Yet a few degrees more

and we are aliens

on a hostile planet

sweltering under a dome,

tracks warping

cables failing

grids overloaded.

The sidewalk

can fry an egg,

asphalt has gone soft.

And we are desperate

for cool ocean air

a fresh mountain breeze.

Will heat be the end of us?

Or will we forget

when normal life resumes

and this infernal dome lifts;

the new normal,

the frog in its bowl.

There is an unprecedented heatwave in the U.S. Midwest and Pacific northwest, and on Canada's west coast and prairies. Records have been set. On July 1 (I'm writing this sentence a few days after the poem was completed and dated) , a wildfire consumed the town of Lytton BC.

Climate change is clearly here – despite the deluded or self-serving deniers – and probably happening not only faster than we thought, but approaching an irreversible tipping point. Every season and every year, it seems, is the hottest to date.

But the terminology surprised me. It's always been a heat wave, never a dome. To my poetic sensibilities, “dome” sounds much more ominous – something permanent, like an architectural structure. While a wave passes, and has the connotation of playing in the surf – something fun you do on vacation. So this was the hook on which I hung the poem, and gave me my opening.

But the heart of the poem is my observation on our narrow tolerances: not only how our civilization grew up in this narrow and rather exceptional window of the earth's climate, but also – as Covid has also shown – the terrible lack of resiliency in the complex interdependent systems we invisibly rely on.

The poem ends with the famous metaphor (or should I say “infamous”, since it's probably not true!) about the frog dropped into boiling water vs the frog in water that is gradually raised to boiling: the first instantly leaps out, while the second slowly succumbs.