Bad Poetry: The World Is Burning, But...

This poem was prompted by Magaly Guerrero, cancer warrior, at Poets & Storytellers United: Write a poem containing the words "the world is burning, but..."  

We live in interesting times.

Too many people have too many cancers.

The foreign news is simply terrible.

Where is peace found? There are no answers.

The campaign lies were just unbearable.

Bestsellers' Substacks are not earning.

Publishers charge to read our rhymes.

Oh yes, dear friends, the world is burning,

But still the small green leaves of spring

Are growing even on sprayed hedges.

Migrating birds begin to sing

On their way back to their own ledges.

By the lake rushes, cattails, sedges

Count fifty years of poison spraying,

Many dead stalks pale round the edges,

And still in green defiance swaying

Murmur that Life still rides above

Cruelty, greed, war, rape, pollution.

Babies and puppies say even Love

May yet deliver restitution.

Spring's first mosquito said, flying by,

"I'm the least wanted thing of the season.

Throw me to the spider, if I must die;

For living Life always has a reason."

Crocus are purple below the hedge.

Daffodils' gold is soon to follow.

Irides show green knife blades' edge

To chickadee, junco, swift, and swallow.

What the old people call redbud winter

Can only temper the way to spring;

Juts from the pathway like a splinter;

And on we go, and still we sing.

("What? No kittens?" my cat Serena would have said, if she knew how to read, if she'd been in the office, which she doesn't and wasn't. "How can you think of things that are painful and things that are wonderful without kittens?"

Serena's viable kittens have been born early in the year, but this year's Big Deep Freeze seemed to put her off the whole idea. I'm warning people who want kittens not to expect one this year. 

"An e-friend," I said, "lost a cat this winter. So then she had room to adopt two kittens. She says they're wild in the sense of being full of instincts and energy, but very friendly and cuddly when they stop running around like Berserkers."

(Kitten photo by the writer known as Priscilla Bird)

There.