CURRICULUM VITAE OF A STRUGGLING WORLD

The night trump was elected,
I went to bed disheartened,
knowing a nightmare lay ahead. 
(Even so, I never dreamed how bad.)

The divisive rhetoric is constant;
it has changed us.

My voice at first resisted, outraged.
Over time, I grew weary and discouraged.
(That is the strategy; it works.
Keep the uproar coming; no one
can muster the moments of clarity
needed to resist.)

The climate crisis is still happening;
we have just been too distracted
to pay attention.

My poems have all become poems of grief:

Tahlequah, Mother Orca,
swimming a thousand miles
with her dead calf on her nose,
expressing our collective heartbreak;

children in cages at the southern border
(still in cages. Is anybody helping?)

The wildfires in Australia, burning up
all the koalas and kangaroos.

George Floyd.

Chantel Moore.

Takaya.

The corona virus.

The people rising up in protest;
the goons in camoflauge beating
them back, yet still they
bravely march.

The forests of California, burning.

This morning Russia is talking about
nuclear responses to perceived threats.
Really, it couldnt get much worse than that,
and they are Going There in their minds.
Will we wake one morning in the rubble?

The earth has the energy of life, 
of interdependence of all species.
It moves through its seasons struggling
against the opposing forces of human
destructiveness, misplaced power and greed.

We need everything to change.
We need leaders to lead, and care.
Mother Nature needs to get some help.

Mother Wind, sing through our
broken human hearts
a song of illumination
and transformation. 

May the ways this past four years
have changed us, change us back
into beings of light and hope once more.

Wild Writing inspired by "Curriculum Vitae" by Lisel Mueller