WATERMARK

Someday, historians and archaeologists will collect data, develop theories, try to understand how it was that we could know what we were doing — to our planet, to each other — and go on doing it. Our best hope now is that those scholars and scientists might be human. 

Because they might not. 

They will ask what happened, and how. How could knowledgeable, educated people destroy themselves like this? Why did they continue in practices that their own studies showed were certain to destroy what they needed to survive? 

Such intelligent, sophisticated beings. They (we) had great cities, universities, art and music, mathematics, technology. Democracy. And they gave it all away. 

Living in it, now, I have thought these thoughts myself, as one of those lost citizens. I see that we have gone crazy. I see us blame each other and escalate the destruction. 

I think we have, in fact, literally gone crazy. We have developed a world-wide mental illness. By pretending that what is happening, is not, we make ourselves crazy. We live in unreality. We endorse the fantasy that ‘climate change is a hoax’ and then want to go on living as if all is normal. 

All is not normal. Even though that we is not everyone, it is enough of us, with sufficient power, to maintain the illusion. Those with the money and power to think they can survive create their own fantasies of how they (not we) will do that. 

In the meantime, all the fear and rage that is repressed, leaks. It leaks onto one another. Suspicion and hostility and mistrust seeps down from its targets onto our next door neighbors. We watch each other from the corners of our eyes. 

We consider ourselves victims, and the others perpetrators. Oppressors. And of course, some of them are. Some of us are. None of us are free actors. We are all consequences. And we are all responsible. 

a sadness of dreaming 


another gray morning I wake 
		from a dream of the end 
				of the world it comes 

without warning the alarm 
		a deafening buzz as all 
				the bees in the world 

die in a hum at the end 
		of it all	 honey gone sour 
and seeping 

from empty hives like 
		sap from dying trees all 
				sweetness lost 

sleet tapping the windows 
		a warning a sigh an 
exhalation of hope 

as I wake in a wonder 
		of fear from a dream at 
				the end of the world 


a pattern of light on the wall 


              ~sb may 02019