(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 beginning.
Peter Buknatski
Montpelier, Vt.