Napowrimo 26: Climate Change

The National Poetry Writing Month challenge for today was to write a poem about writing poetry. 

I stand by the one I wrote more than seven years ago...

"

Some poetry’s bad, Heaven knows,

Yet all poetry’s different from prose.

Bad Poetry’s bound

To patterns of sound

(Though these may not accord quite with those).

It roams through every dialect on Earth,

Stretches rhythms for all that they’re worth,

Chooses subjects prosaic,

Becomes a mosaic

Of thoughts Good Poems never give birth.

What Bad Poetry never will do

Is claim, “I’m so much wiser than you,

If you say I’m not great,

Yourself you denigrate”—

Bad Poetry’s honest and true.

It will freely admit that it’s Bad.

Grandiosity it’s never had.

If it chance to beguile

You into a slight smile,

It may open your mind just a tad.

" 

(Copyright Ⓒ Priscilla King, 2018. Used by permission 😊 )

But the point is to write a new poem each day, so I found an alternative list that invited poems about "loneliness and other impossible situations," "a situation that seems impossible but that you could solve if you wanted to." 

There are situations that are difficult to solve satisfactorily, that could be solved quickly in a way that would probably create worse problems than the original situation. 

Voting for a candidate you don't like personally who's not likely to be of much use on any of the issues that matter to you, who was running against a candidate you don't like personally who's not likely to be of much use on any of the issues that matter to you and who also wants to join other people's war. 

(That's bad enough, so let the majority of Americans who've been in this plight since 2024 consider: being appointed to office by a candidate nobody likes personally, who's not letting you do what your constituent base want you to do, who disagrees with you on several political issues and is probably trying to get you to resign, while you have a personal agenda that requires you to stay where you are.)

Staying with a job that doesn't pay well, but that you enjoy, instead of switching to a job that you'd hate, that wouldn't pay well either, and that you probably wouldn't keep because the reason why the job's open is that the company has hired and fired thirty-eight people for the job already and it's still April.

I live where I want to live. I do many of the things I've always wanted to do. I've not been able to do some other things I've always wanted to do because I am, as my home is, under attack. I have, as my whole neighborhood has, a personal enemy--a land coveter who doesn't even have the fortitude to make offers that would be turned down, who sneaks around trying to ruin people's enjoyment of good land in what used to be a Christian community. After the cat poisoning episode a young man, allegedly a son from what may have been an earlier marriage in another State, was supposed to be watching this Bad Neighbor. Supposedly he's been staying on the other side of the hill and doing nothing worse than spraying poison into the air--not to "protect crops" (he's not planted a crop, nor claimed ownership of a cow, for years) but to make as many neighbors feel as unpleasant as possible. Actually, of course, he slowed down for a season and then resumed the harassment, I think because at this point in his life it's become what he does, who he is...he has to know he's not going to get any more real estate in this neighborhood. And at least he's lost the ability to shoot small animals and leave them in the road. But nasty people never get too old to spread the kind of crazy talk that fascinates people who don't have enough in the way of lives. Rodents don't travel in groups of half a dozen mixed mice and rats of different species, to invade a house that doesn't offer them even water, without some human help; and dumping rodents into basements has been one of this Bad Neighbor's favorite pranks for at least thirty years. And the Cat Sanctuary had rodents in mixed half-dozens this winter; I caught two of different species in one trap, one night. Giving the Bad Neighbor what he wants might solve the problem of being harassed by him, but would certainly create enough other problems that are even worse that it's not a "solution" some of us can even consider.

And then there are public problems, everybody's problems, some of which are soluble if people would just deal with the solutions...

Climate change. It's primarily local. We need leadership,

Of course we do, but not the kind for which globalists clamor.

Leadership by example, we need. Taking the power trip

Out of government, let the elected wield trowel, shovel, hammer.

Let them walk to work every day; let them meet with the electorate

In the road. Let the pavement break up and the roads go to grass.

Cars are good, for the frail and pathetic whose stiff old bones hesitate

To walk on the ground. For the vigorous, let the fad pass.

Let the telecommute be the norm for white-collar employment.

Let the walk to the market become the place where people meet.

Let it be de rigueur, socially, to walk and show enjoyment

Of the flowers and butterflies we notice while on our feet.

It's a hard sell, I know, but it would cool down, without a fight,

Even cities where people cling to their cars as to a right.