An earlier poem of mine called The Last Days, about my daughter and I reading the newspaper over breakfast musing on the state of the world, just appeared in a new anthology from Torrey House Press, entitled Facing The Change: Personal Encounters With Global Warming.
You can check out the anthology description at the Torrey House Press website:
The Last Days
My daughter looks up from the Sunday news—
an earthquake in Pakistan, the many dead—
betrays a quick glance of fear, after so many
hurricanes these last days, New Orleans flooded,
Texas evacuated, Florida bracing, Indonesia
reeling from the last tsunami. The book
of Revelations lies in my childhood memory,
prophecy of flood, famine, fear—but I
can’t bear to tell her my secret misgivings,
that I am nearly fifty, peering down the gauntlet
of my own last days, wondering how to spend
judiciously, extravagantly, each one of them.
But this is all so personal, a sin, really,
when living in the belly of an empire
bent on catapulting us into the next war,
the next bald-faced robbery of a planet’s future
for this year’s money-grab, the whole world
aghast and envious of this drunken bully
staggering belligerently towards oil
like an addict who would do
anything, anything
for just one more fix. But I am no prophet,
succumb to the small world of breakfast
my daughter and I share, intimate,
in these last days of childhood, poised
as she is on the lip of a world that would
just as soon devour as kiss her, and
how can I prepare her for this rogue?
The way fear’s scripture insinuates its way
into the petty concerns of a life lashed
to the mundane but longing for revelation,
for some final reckoning. How do I say
I love you when this world is the only gift,
the pitiless dowry, I have to offer? How
do I say it is you, your brother, your friends,
the only hope for this brooding planet,
a new seed of reluctant messiahs peering
at the earth you shall inherit from us—
this thin, ephemeral line between
Eden and Armageddon.