‘How?’ – A Poem About Navigating the Collapsing World We Find Ourselves In
How can I plant seeds in a garden,
When the overbearing summer that’s long outstayed any welcome destroys what we wrought,
While shriveling up hope like trees gasping for respite,
Only for the ocean to arrive ready to sweep us all away without a second thought or pardon?
How can I breathe in the scent of the morning flowers,
While people are choked by the consequences of deregulation,
When bottom lines of corporations go up in smoke at their own hands,
Fueled by stock buybacks and cut corners?
How can I sit and enjoy a cup of coffee,
While entire towns are drowned in a flood of worsening climate catastrophe,
Leaving people to piece together what’s left of their lives,
Finding in the wreckage their dead neighbors or family?
How can I watch shows or the news on TV,
While people are recording near death experiences and their loved one’s last moments,
Or photographing police guarding groceries from displaced communities they supposedly serve,
Not realizing they, too, have become climate refugees?
How can I clean my house and plan for the future,
While World War 3 starts and the world is crumbling,
When genocidal allies committ terror attacks and invade neighboring nations,
And the wounds are cut too deep to suture?
How can I enjoy my manufactured sense of “freedom,”
While the government abandons our collapsing country coming apart at the seams,
Using taxes to eagerly pay for public lynchings of innocent men,
And fund the bombing of children overseas, massacring people in ways we can’t yet fathom?
How can I not lose my sanity,
While watching the most evil people on the planet gleefully act beyond our wildest imaginations,
Watching them destroy everything around us without restriction in real time,
Live on phones made with the labor of a child’s hands all for our vanity?
How can I sit here every day and function normally,
To be unbothered while the world falls apart before us,
To be expected to look away and not scream or cry,
And remain quiet at the horrors we witness endlessly?
How can I possibly have hope,
When the future feels dark and dangerous?
While people around me continue business as usual,
Feeling nothing or ignoring the feelings of empathy or compassion –
Emotions that should be bursting out of them like a damn breaking?
I don’t know what the answer is yet,
Besides the truth that we’re not supposed to turn away from this,
Knowing it’s a privilege to give up or to look away from the horrors,
And that one lacks of humanity to not starve and thirst for justice for people and the planet.
So I will still plant seeds in the garden and protect the trees like family,
While planning to reap bountiful harvests,
Instead of expecting death to befall the potential for life around me.
I will instead use my breath to speak, and shout, and scream;
To call out the bullshit and lies that I see and advocate for those who are abandoned, silenced, and harmed by the powers that be.
I will gratefully drink a cup of ambition and work to ensure people are not swept away or forgotten,
By reminding others that the plight of one is the plight of all and that together, we stand; divided, we are fallen.
I will solemnly bear witness to the lives of those I see before me,
While listening to their strife and looking into their eyes as they open their wounds to the world, sharing their stories of survival and grief.
I will unapologetically practice self-care to clear the space around me,
While making room for love, light, art, and action so that I can continue to do the work that is necessary to help the world heal and to be the change I want to see.
I will rebelliously use whatever artificial freedom I have to condemn the cancerous corporate empire,
While working toward the freedom of my neighbors far and wide from the oppression they live under.
I will use the tools at my disposal to fight for a liberated world and fight for what’s right,
While acknowledging the blood on our collective hands of the gruesome privilege of having those tools in spite.
I will defiantly refuse to pretend to function normally or look away from a world so fractured,
While feeling my blood roil with rage and my stomach shake like a hurricane of disgust at the gross injustice of the systems that our leaders have structured.
I will confidently cling to hope and use it like a flaming sword in the night knowing we can turn things around,
While helping to light the way for others step out of the dark chasm of their despair or indifference and lead them to higher ground.
This, is how, I will do my part,
It doesn’t feel like much but I hope it’s a good start,
To navigate a collpasing world and work towards a world with a heart,
One where we are all free and fulfilled,
Where we no longer stand apart.
A Note About the Poem
Yesterday and this past week felt heavier than weeks and months prior Perhaps it’s my endurance faltering, or the weight of reality crushing more each day as I see the interconnectedness of everything happening around us as the world seems to collapse.
I had to get the despair out as a I sat and asked myself, “How? How can we continue like this? How can I get through every day and not lose hope?”
This is ‘How.’
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