CLIMATE CHANGE SENDS A POSTCARD TO LOST AMBITION

Climate Change Sends a Postcard to Lost Ambition

Mind opens its garbage can.
Body pours in its refuse.
Centuries fume
across the burning landscape.
Tornadoes of smoke with flaming knees
invade the deeper forest.
Disappearance will have its way
with words choking the planet
using blades as definitions
for oblivion’s foster family
growing its brood
with this paper in your hands.
Fire is the consequence of gluttony.
Know that to know anything
is to honor the humility
of uncertainty
willing to slow its stride
until a poised now appears
willing to reconsider everything
that came before a human thought.
But now is not that day.
Today the visible and the invisible
forms of disease encircle the globe
building thoughts into cities and cities
with the forest’s amputees
burning rage and revenge
up to the cigarette sky
which will soon lower its suffocation
onto the bones of butterflies between
strafing deserts and surging seas.
The lungs of the planet are ready
to seek a new way.
The monk extends the loss of branches.
The saint preaches the law of drying seeds.
The penitent switches the crown of imagination.
The criminal replaces the trunks of ignorance with indifference
and fits new blades onto the Hydra limbs of avarice.
The last tree stands as a loosed second hand
from a clock swinging the future
between the charcoal ruins and birds
unable to live in the fevered air.

Climate Change Kisses an Amputated Forest

Mind opens its garbage can.
Body pours in its refuse.
Centuries fume
across the burning landscape.
Tornadoes of smoke with flaming knees
invade the deeper forest.
Disappearance will have its way
with words choking the planet
using blades as definitions
for oblivion’s foster family
growing its brood
with this paper in your hands.
Fire is the consequence of gluttony.
Know that to know anything
is to honor the humility
of uncertainty
willing to slow its stride
until a poised now appears
willing to reconsider everything
that came before a human thought.
But now is not that day.
Today the visible and the invisible
forms of disease encircle the globe
building thoughts into cities and cities
with the forest’s amputees
burning rage and revenge
up to the cigarette sky
which will soon lower its suffocation
onto the bones of butterflies between
strafing deserts and surging seas.
The lungs of the planet are ready
to seek a new way.
The monk extends the loss of branches.
The saint preaches the law of drying seeds.
The penitent switches the crown of imagination.
The criminal replaces the trunks of ignorance with indifference
and fits new blades onto the Hydra limbs of avarice.
The last tree stands as a loosed second hand
from a clock swinging the future
between the charcoal ruins and birds
unable to live in the fevered air.
Accomplish maybe the wind says
and all this may yet change.

Climate Change Chases Our Ghosts into a Cave

We first shot the day
in its antelope legs.
After that
the heart of a cloud
was lassoed into dagger rain.
Next we branded the ocean
with refuse and ruin
until it reached the shore.
Then came the invisible herd
heading elsewhere
than the lowering sun.
Still running, its force
carried the lost parchments
to the Cave of Removals
where this and now hide
in the afterlife
of time’s simulacra
concealed or named
by God, the one
who is several
nowheres at once.
Depending upon the mood
of the second or the season
we can no longer determine
where the Great Evening ends
or if it ever rests its shoulders
on a dream
of the first wings of spring
still racing around the globe
searching for what can be saved.

Climate Change Swims Blank Through the Malevolent Sea

Blank has had enough
of the repercussions.
A few decades later
evading the jellyfish armies
he reaches the butterfly shallows
of undersea wings,
intricate, hard-edged
mechanical blunders
of evolution’s former ambition
to confirm the rumor
that somewhere even higher
above the new waterline
was a civilization of two-legged beings
as vast as the eight-armed one he once knew
below the waterline.
Now he is only a proof
of the correlation between
ghosts and memories
and what the equation equals
in the long aftermath
of dissolving numbers.
And he wonders how long
after the last memory is gone
does it take
an eight-armed ghost to finally be
the last one to disappear
from the brown vinegar sea.

Climate Change Stops Before the New Mirror

The brigand yesterday
jailbreaks the sunrise
stealing shade for its noon.
Dead butterflies watch from the shore.
A buffalo roams the landscape of lost memory.
Three wolves howl at defunct history.
Next is an illusion of spent force.
But is a stale interruption.
If can no longer walk forward.
Then never was here.
The near edge of time weakens.
A parade retreats behind its origin.
No fish swim the new battlefield.
The full accounting begins
with the imprint of a bone.
You too are not there.

H. A. Sappho is a native of Los Angeles with expat time spent in Prague, Berlin, and Hanoi. His baseline interest is archetypal psychology. These poems are from a completed book, In the Pandemic’s Caboose. Currently he is at work on FAUST, Part 3.