The Great Grief

This more-than-personal sadness is what I call the “Great Grief”—a feeling that rises in us as if from the Earth itself…. that our individual grief and emotional loss can actually be a reaction to the decline of our air, water, and ecology
—Per Espen Stoknes

As plastic smothers
Oceans and forests miss trees
I grieve with you, Dear
We drink polluted water—
“Ethics of entanglement”

*

Your mother performed
Absence so you do not know
Limits to desire
Whenever you face the loss
Of dolphins a void hammers

*

Drought in the desert
Cut through the cactus to see
Interior as dry
As the cracked sod surrounding
You, for whom no one sheds tears

*

When dinosaurs ruled
Skies rarely lapsed to yellows
King Midas’ false gold
Within a blue, velvet box
Your pearls become small citrons

*

When the ocean grieves
Its anguish can’t be discerned
Water swallows tears
I insist the faucet broke
Spraying my cheeks with non-tears

*

Where waterfalls end
Your face welcomes the cool spray
You admire beauty
From wet silver eroding
Mountains aware of their death

*

Storm season arrives
Snow falls beyond the window
Whitening the world
Yet its lack of sound cancels
Belief—as if worlds don’t fall

*

Black cat against night
Against thoughts as the world burns
Like children playing
Hide-and-seek in parks so bright
No one stumbled on omens

*

“Despair for the world”
Grew, leading him to water
Floating on the lake
He waits for peace, not knowing
Hunters shot the great heron

*

We’d grimly thinned trees
To prepare for winter’s winds
But the leaves still fell
Tree limbs still broke. How did we
Come to trust preparation?