Look up at the sky, a cloud funnelling down
on the other side of blue, look down
at the ground, a crack from drought splitting
open the earth, deep as the crevice Hades
thundered through in his chariot to steal
Persephone from her mother holding up
an August bundle of diminished wheat.
Weather shapes our lives, we cannot
doubt. We exchange news of the weather
on our daily walk, stirring the white in the coffee cup
at work. Farmer’s Almanac and a bitter, long winter
ahead, just check the Weather Channel – right
as the oracle at Delphi, right enough to keep us
looking it up and looking out. A meteorite thrown
by a solar ray dressed in a ghostly sleeve of wind
that blocked the sun, and the dinosaurs lumbering
in a red-ash dusk, the bigger ones dying out.
Ice storms stalked a race of Neanderthals
unequipped with tamed wolves to hunt and
stay warm against the growing cold and so
they died out. Whether a volcano offset
the seasonal winds that brought the monsoons
to the Nile the year Cleopatra fell – a cracked silt
mighty river bed like an old woman’s face. Revolts
in Egypt, though the Queen wiser than the previous
Ptolemies, forbade grain exports, stored wheat
in public bins for public support. Whether weather
brought a bumper crop to the prairies (or not), a politician
was praised; then came drought, lentils like dried up teats
and the same politician was blamed. Resources were reaped
and the ground gaped with craters and gravel pits, blackened soil
and a mighty machine of a population ran their industries, their power
plants, their vehicles and devices that warmed
the hive of the earth as busy bees, and the planet
overheated: Good, no more winter, no
more unhappiness, sultry days ahead: we may
now plant watermelons and persimmons
as far as the Arctic Circle,
but crops do not grow out of shield rock:
the ice caps melting…
and the oceans rising… frequent floods
or no, droughts in the interior of continents. So
hard to tell the weather – whether this one a colder
with rimy trees down main street, really quite eerie
or warmer, is it? A rare yellow-breasted bunting
blown across Europe and an ocean
from a flooded rice paddy in China
landing in a neighbour’s backyard bird-feeder
was surely a sign of hope, wasn’t it?
Stan is plying the poor bedraggled thing with tropical seed
just hope it makes it through –
without a mate…
Meanwhile… homo sap would have
to sort it out:
So hard to do with the playground
of the world as he had conceived it
set out so solidly, unchangeably
before him: the ruts of his roads and infrastructures
whizzing (so shiny!) with transport
buzzing (quite grimy!) with industry
steaming lustily to the animals living out
of the way, ones that encroached on the expanding city, culled
or shot dead or hunted from some adrenalin-surged
memory of the hunt still red in his blood,
not to mention the usual road kill.
