Shifting Baselines

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With shifting baselines,
every day another consternation
or outrage of injustice to contemplate,
we become like frogs,
leaping from lilypad to lilypad
in a churning swamp,
too busy keeping afloat
to remember
the wildfires that will come again,
the melting poles,
the warming atmosphere
now that we resignedly accept
without an eyeblink
that we will never meet
emission targets in time.

A torpor of the spirit, a vast ennui,
a resignation falls upon my
once so hopeful heart.
I Become the Observer
of the mad societal dance.
We learn too late
that we must change or die.

The ancestors are weeping on the wind.
The planet turns and burns.
More wild things die.
In quiet moments,
I can almost hear their mournful cries.


for Brendan at earthweal: Shifting Baselines where he astutely describes we humans "frogging the boil", such an awesome description. I can't even wrap my head around the number of deaths from covid. Each one a heartbreak.