What’s Missing Here?

(I don’t like what I’m not seeing these past two Spring/Summers.  No ducks in the river in downtown Montpelier, and no monarch or other colorful butterflies around.  Call this an Ode To Al Gore, who might have begun serious work on Global Warming back in 2001, when it would have mattered.  It would certainly be a different world now.  I heard from an ‘expert’ in 1999 at a forum on Global Warming that we only had about a dozen years before Global Warming became irreversible.  That’s a 2011 deadline.  As Harry Dean Stanton would put it: Shit.)

Ducks and butterflies

have disappeared

yet no one notices.

Alaska melts and rain

keeps coming every day

and no one worries.

There’s a party tonight

where zombies boogie

and send off drones.

And no one to stop them.

Celebrities feed the poor

their wretched excesses

and no one says a word.

Buddhists chant on Facebook

and everyone jumps in to share

the bullshit of inner peace.

But no one really has a clue.

If you told people that the end

of the world was next Friday

would any one bat an eye?

No one really cares any more

about any thing except how not

to notice or even talk about

the ducks and butterflies.

All gone now and this is just

the beginni
ng.

Peter Buknatski

Montpelier, Vt.