Poem #7893

We stand at the edge of what we've made,
this precipice of our own design,
where ice sheets calve into dark waters
and ancient glaciers weep themselves into oblivion.

The earth keeps its own records—
core samples drilled from polar depths,
tree rings that speak in silent testimony,
sediment layers holding the truth
of what we've done, what we continue to do.

Somewhere, a polar bear swims
farther than evolution prepared it to swim,
searching for ice that used to be there,
that should be there, that isn't.
Its muscles burn with lactic acid,
its massive paws churning through waves
that grow longer each year,
until finally, there is only the water
and the surrender.

In coral reefs, the bleaching continues—
those underwater gardens turning ghost-white,
expelling their symbiotic algae in stress,
becoming skeletal monuments to waters
that have grown too warm, too acidic,
too changed from what they were.
The fish that once darted through living color
now navigate graveyards.

We measure the change in parts per million,
in degrees Celsius climbing upward,
in hectares of rainforest cleared,
in species gone extinct before we learned their names.
The numbers accumulate like compound interest,
and we are the debtors,
our children the ones who will pay.

In Bangladesh, in the Maldives, in Tuvalu,
people watch the water rise
not as abstraction but as daily reality—
salt corrupting their wells,
waves consuming their ancestral lands,
their entire nations becoming past tense.
Climate refugees, we call them,
as if giving it a name makes it less shameful
that we've turned the earth itself
into something people must flee.

The permafrost thaws in Siberia,
releasing methane trapped for millennia,
a feedback loop we cannot stop,
only witness as it accelerates
the very warming that caused it.
The tundra buckles and collapses,
craters opening like wounds
in the earth's frozen skin.

Wildfires rage across continents
with a ferocity we pretend to call unprecedented,
though by now the precedent renews itself each year.
The smoke crosses oceans, dims distant skies,
fills the lungs of millions who never saw the flames.
Forests that took centuries to grow
become ash in hours,
releasing their stored carbon
back into an atmosphere already oversaturated.

Droughts crack the earth in geometric patterns,
riverbeds expose stones that haven't seen sunlight
in living memory, in recorded history.
Farmers watch their crops wither,
their livelihoods turn to dust,
while elsewhere, floods devastate
with equal ruthlessness—
the water cycle itself thrown into chaos,
too much or too little, never the balance
that civilizations were built upon.

We speak of tipping points
as if they are still ahead of us,
convenient markers we haven't yet reached,
but some scientists whisper
that we may have already passed them,
that the cascades have already begun,
that we are watching dominoes fall
in slow motion, too gradual to panic over,
too fast to stop.

The migrating birds arrive earlier each spring,
or later, or not at all,
their ancient chronologies disrupted.
Plant blooming cycles shift out of sync
with the pollinators that depend on them.
Ecosystems unravel thread by thread,
and we catalog the losses
with the detachment of accountants,
as if extinction were merely data.

Yet still, the machinery of industry churns,
fossil fuels pulled from the earth's depths,
ignited, transformed into motion and heat and power,
and as byproduct, this invisible shroud
that wraps itself tighter around our atmosphere.
We know, we have always known,
but knowing and acting are different verbs,
and we have conjugated them
in opposite directions.

There are those who deny it still,
who call it hoax or exaggeration,
who point to winter snow as evidence
that nothing fundamental has changed.
But the glaciers don't debate,
the drowned islands don't argue,
the extinct species don't negotiate.
The physics simply proceeds,
indifferent to our politics,
our economies, our comfortable lies.

Perhaps we will innovate our way forward,
harness technology to pull carbon from the air,
reverse what we have done,
engineer solutions as ambitious
as the problem we've created.
Or perhaps we will adapt,
our cities rebuilt on higher ground,
our agriculture transformed,
our very conception of normal
revised to accommodate a hotter,
more volatile planet.

Or perhaps our grandchildren will inherit
a world diminished beyond recognition,
and they will read about polar bears
the way we read about mammoths,
and they will know that we knew,
that we had the science, the evidence,
the warnings, the time,
and still we chose
to pass this burden on to them.

The earth will survive us, certainly—
it has endured worse extinctions,
more dramatic climate shifts
across its deep history.
Life will persist in some form,
adapt, evolve, fill the empty niches
we leave behind.

But this particular world,
this delicate balance of conditions
that allowed our civilization to flourish,
this Goldilocks moment of climate stability—
this, we are losing,
have lost,
continue to lose
with each day we delay
the great turning that must come,
if it comes at all.