As if it weren’t enough to bear
the world’s dark cloak, the inhumanity
of man which knows no limit,
30-foot high flash-flooded rivers, the charred
acres lit by wind and lightning or cigarette butts
cheerfully tossed out speeding car windows
at midnight, we can’t escape our own
shallow thinking: who has wretched taste
in evening wear, or too many tattoos,
who exudes the rank smell of weed through
his pores in the 9-item quick line. Jesus, it’s bad.
Worth masking up again even if you aren’t afraid
of Covid or SARS the way you should be.
Managing so many large and small disasters
while newly on a budget and nervous about keeping
your job, or Medicaid, or Social Security,
and the chemo has ruined the nerves in your feet
so you keep falling in strange places for no reason.
Fuck. And then Gaza, and Sudan, and ICE picking
off people who aren’t white enough to live
in this country or at all according to the spiteful
rich bastards in charge this week. I am so furious,
and sorry, and don’t think writing poetry
does much good unless you accidentally hit
the bulls-eye sweet spot of something obvious
but deep that has never been said, or not recently,
not in today’s language, somehow blending
hope and humor in a salve to smear over
this seeping wound we all have. A little respite.
Other than that it’s just line after line
of ordinary frustration. And now we’re all sitting
around on a Friday morning in July and I just turned
70, the coming of age of everyone who’s ever
been elderly. I mean, really, what the fuck?!
Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She’s also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection, Walking Wheel, comes out in April from Red Hen Press. She lives in California’s Sierra foothills.
