It’s Happening Now, Already
It’s really nothing new, except
for the scale of it,
and its democratic impact.
Life has always ended
as a journey of loss
of material things, people, places,
of physical abilities and mental prowess,
but individually, each pretending
they would be excluded, immortal,
until, accepting or not, their death comes.
For some the process is more rapid or slow.
Plus, some cling to denial longer than others
before accepting the inevitable.
Each of us faced loss in our own time
and in our own style, with no one
except our age cohort or fellow victims
of a disease or accident.
But this, this is a group event,
a diminishing not just of our
own body and our own things
as they grow old and wear out,
but of our whole life-support system,
the Earth, depleted and worn out.
All of us diminished in tandem,
step by step together
because we caused it together.
It will happen.
It is happening.
The only decision we have left
is whether to die alone, withdrawn or angry,
or to cling together as the escalator
we’ve built drops us into the abyss.
The Change
Hot flash heat waves
Sweating floods
Dry skin droughts
Polar vortex chills
Loss of fertility, barren . . .
Oh, Mother Earth,
your dependent children
have induced your early
menopause, and you can
no longer give life
