Written 12/20/2016
They say tonight,
will be the darkest night
in five hundred years,
Two other stories
I read about recently
brought me Anxiety and Sorrow.
I think, they are all connected.
Yesterday I read the headline,
“River of Molten Lead found Under Alaska,
Thought to Help Regulate the Earth’s Magnetic Pull.”
I could not click through
to the whole story –
I felt panic
Dread.
I thought, “oh no.”
Now they’ll use that up too.
And what pull will we have left then?
I felt the apocalypse and for the first time ever
I didn’t chide myself for being melodramatic.
Today, I read a story about a stolen Cedar Tree
In Mobile, Alabama.
Taken from a community park
And dressed up in shiny baubles
To hide a score board
and improve the backdrop
for a scary, little, man.
I read the story this time,
I wanted to hear
about this tree
and it’s gnarly trunk
and those who came to visit it.
And it pained me to hear
of the regular park goers
heading off to work, and returning
with their dogs to find
only a shaven stump.
You know,
I never liked the story “The Giving Tree,”
always thought “that poor tree,”
that little boy just takes and takes
until there is nothing left
and that tree is just a stump too.
And I thought,
even as a child,
“What kind of story is this?”
This is not justice.
This is not kindness.
This is abuse!
And here is that story,
Come to life,
And here is that little boy
Grown in size.
And here is the corpse
of the tree, chopped and hauled away.
And what will a man like this
do to a river beneath Alaska
that could untilt the world
and send us into
the next
darkest night?
Yes, I think they are all connected.
These stories and more.
Yet I hope,
I hope tomorrow’s headline
Will tell me that it wasn’t cloudy
in Newgrange,
And the sunrise
shone through on time.
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