What We Do Not Know

The poem I posted yesterday, still in process of revision (even the title has changed!)


Early morning, lakeside:
a lone fisherman steers his dugout across the waves,
returning from his night’s work. He sees the cormorants
drying their wings on the rocks just offshore.
He sees the scientists already at work at their station on the beach;
sunlight reflects from the rotating blades of their apparatus.

Mostly these days, his is the only boat. It is a longer night than it used to be,
and harder work, and further from shore.
The scientists watch him from the shoreline. They know
how short the time is, and how much they still do not know.
In one place storms level trees and flood the land,
in another, fertile valleys are turned to desert, as the good soil blows like sand.
Tiny dots of life in the oceans that feed the great whales,
are part as well of what makes our climate work,
part of a chain that may be breaking. The stuff we do,
the stuff we empty into the water, maybe on the other side of the world,
is changing the physics and chemistry of the oceans,
and therefore their biology too,
while the plastic bits and bags we throw away
pile up on the beaches of remote Pacific islands,
and in the guts of turtles, too.

Each dying turtle takes a part of our planet with it;
and if the planet is dying,
then be sure that we shall be dying too.
Standing as we do on the shoreline of discovery,
too often we choose to look the other way, with
our souls replaced by microchips, and our selves encased in chrome;
we must not forget the sober, essential truth
that we ourselves link into the same chain as turtles.

Early morning, lakeside: all the fisherman knows
is that the fish are no longer what they were, or where they were;
the morning sun ignites as always a rosy glow on the lakeside hills,
but let us not be fooled; things that used to be balanced
are in balance no longer.