Month of Poetry, 2014, Day 10: After

After

Chytrid took the frogs
but the salamanders simply shrank into oblivion.
The honeybees collapsed
and the fisheries too.

The glaciers calved themselves infertile.;

And the sea level?
Don't even ask me about the estuaries,
let alone New York, New Orleans,
or half of Florida.

The coral bleached
delicate white bones.

The trees you say?
There were the beetles, the borers, the adelgids, the moths
the fungus, the bacteria, the inexplicable
Sudden Die-offs.
There were a lot of those.

Oh, forget polar bears
elephants
whales
snow leopards.
Look how long we did without
Carolina parakeets
ivory billed woodpeckers
great auks
passenger pigeons
the dodo.
Who even misses the woolly mammoth?

The skies brought drought,
tornadoes, floods, hurricanes,
stinking black smog,
dust storms from halfway around the world.

You know about the water, of course.
Fracking slurry, coal ash,
atrizine, jet fuel.
Injected underground.
Diverted, dammed, damned, and drained.

The children?
What about the children?
You should have thought about the children a long time ago.