Anything About It
-1-
We are all here together with the cold
waiting for our day of spring then dreading
what summers have become. It’s not the heat
but the morbidity, the knowledge that
the intervention might have come too late.
It’s political, really, this lobby
for gentler seasons and native species.
So far the votes call for lower mileage
and shorter life-lists, for which the app
can only become cheaper by the year.
Ask not what you can do for your planet
but how many years remain in which to play
an ever-quicker killer in that game
where aliens try to claim our precious world.
-2-
The struggle continues but no one knows
where or even why. On any given day
the roles of oppressor and oppressed change;
justice switches partners with tradition.
Oh how we mourn the politically correct
taking the side of rabbits against hawks.
Then hawks show their pest control credentials
and courts rule again, and yet again.
Some days you want to live to see the end;
there’s no end until the end of us.
A car pulls into the driveway and parks
where horses once stood on filthy flagstones
breathing untainted air. I could go on,
and will until I can’t, though it still will.
M. A. Schaffner has work recently published or forthcoming in The Hollins Critic, Magma, Tulane Review, Gargoyle, and The Delinquent. Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19th century.
Copyright © 2014 by M.A. Schaffner