phanaerozoic

STOP, the sun says, ruddy-faced in a sky scorched
by the desolation of a hundred million acres of wildfires.
It’s not just pique, you know. That’s not an armful of ash
graying the sky, it’s an inundation, an avalanche
of carbon-dioxide poisoning burying us all.
It’s climate-perversion wreaked on coming generations
by ours. It’s our childrens’ world crumbling around them
as we sit at our hundred thousand stop lights, our hundred
million exhausts huffing into the dulling evening air.

~Roy Beckemeyer, August, 2023

This poem was inspired one evening as I drove home from the hospital where my wife Pat was battling pneumonia. I pulled up to this stop sign and the wildfire smoke in the upper atmosphere had made the sun appear reddish-orange and the first thing I thought was it looked very much like the stop lights. I clicked off a couple of quick cell phone shots through my windshield and drove on. Perusing the picture later, already in a somber mood because of Pat’s illness, this poem came to life. Pat is home now and recovering with the help of in-home nursing and physical and occupational therapists.