The Year Without Summer - May 20 2025

 

The Year Without Summer

May 20 2025

The year of no summer.

Not glaciers, exactly.

After all, songbirds sang

flowers bloomed.

and crabgrass grew.

Skittish deer

still gobbled up my broccoli

and nibbled on my carrot tops,

ate all the hostas

to the roots.

If anything

it was actually green and lush

and unusually hot.

Ice cream melted

just as before,

a half-finished cone

turning to mush

in a sticky-fingered hand.

Which I'd lick clean, as one does,

but there was no chocolate rush

no desire for more.

And what was this numbness

in the summer warmth,

darkness

in full daylight;

was it simply my eyes

failing to adjust?

And why did I remain

behind closed doors

with sun-warmed sand so tempting?

While the long summer days

felt even longer,

as if a weary earth

was circling slower and slower,

quietly wondering

just what for?

In the 16th century

a “little ice age” began

that would last a few hundred years;

crops withered

there were “frost fairs” on the Thames.

Was the medieval God displeased

by the faithful transgressing

the faithless who sinned?

An Old Testament God

who is quick to judge

and not so well tempered

when His mercy is strained.

But clearly, this year of no summer

was neither theological

nor nature run amok.

Something else

must have gotten into me.

Meteorology comes from meteor,

as if shooting stars

were augurs and portents,

the cosmos

determined our fate.

So perhaps it was extra-terrestrial,

like aliens

beaming up my comatose body

to probe and explore,

a worm hole

I somehow got caught in.

A paralyzing cold

that went more than skin deep,

its crystals

with their sharpened arms and brittle points

cutting to the heart of me.

My poems are rarely autobiography. This one isn’t either. It’s not the last desperate plea of a depressed man.

Rather, what led to it was another cool day in late May (definitely unseasonable), which brought to mind what has been called the “little ice age”. According to the New Yorker (see below for the link), it began in 1570, and lasted for centuries. Although the world first started to turn colder around 1300, and later — in 1815 —the Tambora eruption in Indonesia (the most powerful in recorded history) caused “the year without summer”: crops failed, the Thames froze. (Although the last “frost fair” — one of many — was in 1814, apparently another cold year.) Only in the late 19th century did a warming trend begin, and — accelerated by greenhouse gas caused climate change — it continues today. So our notion of "normal" may not be normal at all!

I started with that simple line, and as I wrote on, the metaphor just wormed its way in.

But it’s not me; because while I may be a bit more blue than usual (a blue mood being the resting state of nihilists, pessimists, misanthropes, and over-thinkers like me!), I’m not this black!

(How the Little Ice Age Changed History

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/01/how-the-little-ice-age-changed-history).