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IN A NEGATIVE POSITIVE-FEEDBACK LOOP

4/22/2014

2 Comments

 
This being Earth Day, here's a dark and pessimistic poem I wrote last summer.

(thoughts of a story teller on a hot afternoon in July 2013 after reading Wade Sikorski’s book)
     “Change unfolds in a linear manner up to a point, entirely predictably, then suddenly the dynamic changes. A small change tips the unfolding pattern, a threshold is crossed, small triggers are amplified, and feedbacks proliferate until a new equilibrium is reached.”
-- Before it is too Late: The Climate Crisis and Economic Development, Wade Sikorski © 2011, 2013

Each day I write:

About made-up persons,
  a family long ago,
  history in story.

About made-up places
  from mists of high Scotland
  to prairie Montana.

Should I instead:

Write a made-up future?
  Future-history like
  Heinlein or Asimov.

About future persons
  desperate, surviving,
  often not surviving.

Write of future:

Fierce storms, vast destruction
  Of drowned coastal cities--
  ocean where shores had been

Places cooked, forsaken
  in parched, wasteland expanse –
  desert where once was corn,

But I do not.

I write from a present
  private heaven-on-earth
  lost in my own fictions.

Writing, I seek a past,
  with lives torn asunder
  where yet and still hope thrives.

Each day I write.

Were I to write future
  could I write such darkness,
  despair I envision?

With lives torn asunder
  from rising tides over land,
  from scarce food and water;
 
Where vanquished will become
  the food of the victor
  who themselves then become
          
Others’ vanquished morsel
  soon becoming as weak
  starved of humanity

Where forests burn away,
  icecaps melt, oceans steam,
  mammal is dinosaur.

To write future

How distant must I look?
  fifty, a hundred years,
  or even further still?

‘Til civilization
   disappears from the earth
   by famine and fighting
     
Until in new climate
  hunters and gatherers
  become human again?

We are seven billion.
  Will some survive on earth
  to build a new order?

Is there any real hope?
  And didn’t Brin write this?
  We have not ears to hear.

We hide from what is real
  yet know we have to change   
  that new hope may yet thrive.

If I write of future,
  shall I look further still?
  A hundred million years?

Until some new creature
  steps from a new Eden
  to feast on fossil fuels

Fuels from our extinction
  Becoming civilized,
  pretense to be like God
      
Claim to be civilized
  toward the creature’s own ends.
  Is hope so far distant?

Where some new sentient one
  among all of its millions
  must write down a record.

Who will write every day
  Stories of recent past
  Where lives are torn apart

But where hope thrives.

Who asks, “What should I write?
  A story of future?
  A story where hope thrives?”

Each day I write.

Is mine a dark vision?
  Is it an endless void,
  or a caution worthy
 
of the Eternal One,
  the Creativity
  heart of the Universe?

Each day I write.

Each day I hope.

Each day I write, hope, pray
  for my grandchildren, and
  the world they inherit.

Each day. 
2 Comments
sue
4/22/2014 01:03:50 pm

Yes each day. Thanks

Reply
Su DeBree
10/19/2015 04:22:33 pm

I'm just finding and catching up on your contributions here, Kent. Thank you for writing every day. You are an inspiration to me always.

Reply



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    Author

    I retired from active ministry in the United Methodist Church in 2012. Then I sat at my computer and wrote down the novel that had been churning in my head for many years, and published "I've Seen Dry" through my Wheatgrass Publishing imprint. Now writing had become a nice habit, so I do it every day. I completed my second novel in the spring and published in July 2014. 

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