Written while in residence at The Hermitage Artist Retreat, August 2023 and Performed at Art & Soul’s Poetry Night August 25, 2023.
These Days
Amanda Cantrell Roche
These days
These intensely hot days
When we shelter inside
And I feel for the Sycamore
and other living things outside my windows
languid in the heat
These days, these moments,
Have a new weight.
These nights
freakishly frigid winter nights
That push water pipes
And heat pumps
beyond their capacity
to function
These nights
I lie awake as pipes freeze and burst
and wonder if this is
an anomaly or
a new normal.
These days
I rarely relish a thunderstorm.
I used to come alive with the power
Of a spring storm
Sitting on the back deck
Mist and rain on my skin
soaking in the energy of it
Watching the tree tops dance in circles
Sometimes,
intoxicated with the delight of it all
I would join them
These days
When the storms come
Shorter, but fiercer
They often bring downed trees
Washed out driveway
Flooded crawlspace
These days
I wait, uneasily, for them to be over
And assess the damage.
These days with
The news of the climate
Of major hurricanes and historic wildfires
Droughts, floods, and deadly heat
I sometimes have to shut it all out
And lose myself in
A distraction
Or root myself in nature
In the beauty that can be found
In the moment
a glance up
At a sublime sky
Impossible intricacies of clouds
Creating
The most stunning
equitable
And ephemeral
Work of art
These days I wonder
if we empaths
who, from time to time
allow ourselves to look deeply
at what’s happening
And feel it
Heavy and vibrating in our core
Are we canaries in a climate coal mine?
It’s hard to say aloud
For I have young adult children
Who should not have to grow
Into a world so turbulent
And uncertain
It’s hard to say aloud
But it lives too often in my head
And I wonder if it might, at times,
live in yours too;
We have fucked up, royally.
And we are still fucking up.
And sometimes it feels like
Most of us have our heads stuck in
In the sand –
Stuck in our phones
or in the minutia of our lives
To distract us from the
Reality
of a world in which the
Problems
Can feel
Colassol
Unsolvable
And an individual
So powerless
And insignificant
In the shadow of them
These days
I long for everyone with the capacity
To take a moment
To look just two generations ahead
And consider what those lives will be
If we continue on this reprehensible path
We’ve got to
Pay better attention
Somehow
Come together
Make changes
Starting small, but with the momentum of a wildfire
Sparking others around us
To action
Building to bigger changes
That can alter the disgraceful course
We’re on
For our own future
And our children’s children
Because one of these days
It will be too late.