Monique van Maare
Resilience
Image by Ed Hawkins, licensed under CC BY 4.0. https://showyourstripes.info/
Baby blue
to a thick blood-red,
the scientist’s barcode reads
a planet bleeding out. Anemic,
breathless, foaming
at her rivers’ mouths
spewing serial floods
up and over coastal cities,
heaving, sloshing through valleys,
roaring at the vulnerable who have least
caused her fury.
The russet heat, trapped
beneath that heavy blanket of indulgent fumes
pushes out another tide,
of people, fleeing
the shrivelling crops, the searing cities.
Swells of migrations pouring
across the latitudes
from the Tropics to the North.
It is she who will live—
weather the red-hot fever of us.
An ocean patch, mid-Pacific, trawler-scrubbed bare,
returns to a teeming,
tiny krill and crayfish
answering to the screaming
famine of her deep-blue belly, soon
sardines and sharks will swarm in, too.
If only she is left alone.
Joshua trees planted
one at a time, dotting the desert
with green eyes, to watch the arid landscape
grow wild and lush again.
The thirst to see,
biding all that time
beneath the sand.
Let her resilience
tether us to our own,
unearth the buried means
to calm the fester,
stem the crimson floods.