Living Recklessly

 

What is this world coming to?
We've become awkward and hapless
in our long-familiar environments
suddenly quirky, demented beyond
meticulous meteorological record
keeping and aboriginal recall.

The reliable, familiar and long
accustomed climate we have so
carefully adapted toward has turned
in against itself and our expectations
like Nature pouting that she has been
for far too long taken for granted. A
bruise to her dignity and imperial majesty
she will no longer countenance.

So, mortals, live in fear and suspense and
countenance this, if you can: massive
snow squalls without end, ferociously-driven
winds driving monsoon rains and widespread
flooding or snow banked as high as a
highway overpasses; icy terrain and great
tidal bores uplifting the restless seas.

Opaque fogs obliterating sight lines.
All human efforts to cope destined to fail,
the skies and the land and the seas suddenly
owned once again by the elements, absent
human-contrived conveyances as trains,
planes and ships are mute and humbled.

Mass migrations of people and animals
fleeing inundating floods submerging
bridges, highways, homes and hope.
Earth-shuddering quakes, arousing
tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions sending
rivers of molten mineral and dense, dank
curtains of ash to obscure the sun and the
wide, blue sky. Treacherous landscapes
where once benign, arable fields lay.

The uncertainty of surprise and survival
stalks the land as nations strive to cope
with disastrous by-products of Nature's
pique expressed in unimaginable levels of
geologic, climatic and geographical extremes
we struggle to surmount, as ineffectual
bystanders complicit in our own undoing
as though fate would so have it.