In the Dystopia

In the Dystopia

In the dystopia, our houses
are scooped out underground.
We think it makes them fire-safe,
but no-one knows quite how to solve
the problem of where our air comes in –
when the air is falling ash.
And then there’s the question
of what might happen
to a house underground in a flood.

In the dystopia, when it began,
I wanted to wait for you –
but your legs were twisting as they burned
and you couldn’t keep up. The trees fell
to block your path, and I didn’t even know.
I was running. I’m still running.

In the dystopia, we’re going to need hope.
We can die out – even from despair.
Luckily, the day-to-day living
eats up our time and attention
with its many small accommodations.
Just the simple foraging for food
takes effort, and the calculations
about avoiding gas pockets
or the choking remnants of smoke
in the lingering fires ... and the fires!

They can turn suddenly, the fires,
appearing to chase whatever still lives
as if they had volition. We can’t
second-guess their vagaries, but we try.
Not as if we can’t see them coming!
We have become faster runners,
those of us not too starved and exhausted.
(Those of us distant enough to have time to run.)

In the dystopia, there’s little strength to spare
for conversation, or the banding together
in tribes — yet we do huddle, when we can,
in small, almost-silent clusters. We’ve lost
the will for relationship. Yet still
we cuddle our children, those that survived.

In the dystopia, the children,
not knowing a different way,
still exclaim at a struggling flower
or a stray bird — which we adults, now,
see merely as food. The children
have sometimes been heard singing.
They learnt it all by themselves.
Perhaps it’s natural for humans
to make those happy noises
when we haven’t been wrung dry.

In the dystopia, we don’t know
who or what is over the next hill,
let alone in any other countries.
We don’t know if there are
any other countries. We only know
that, near the coast, mountainous waves
came and quenched the fires there.
But we can’t live near a coast
of such frequent tsunamis,
or the crocodiles closer inland
and very much further south.

In the dystopia
no-one stops to write poems.
(Although ...
some of the children....)



Written for Brendan's earthweal Open Link Weekend #5, where he invites us to turn in our writing from 'wrongness' to Renewal.  I tried, I really did....  Well, there is a little suggestion there. I hope that – in all contexts – it might be enough.

Also sharing with Writers' Pantry #5 at Poets and Storytellers United, where Magaly talks about light at the end of a tunnel – a real, practical, in-the-world, here-and-now light.