Meet Us Where We Are

Slow down and forget
The first line, the one
That you had in mind.

There’s a certain sort
Of landscape writing
Readers think antique—

Mystic, spiritual
Remoteness, Wordsworth
Noting the hedgerows

At Tintern Abbey
And not mentioning
The sprawled encampments

Of the homeless poor
In his nature scene—
Withdrawal without

Recounting the loss,
The cost to others,
Of a ruined world.

But the world is not
Ruined. It’s hungry,
Always was. Life leaves

Living’s waste behind,
Feasts for other lives
Or toxic horrors.

Slow down and meet us
Where we are. Delphic
Prognostications

Are AI these days,
And the waste’s plastic,
And the displaced move

Away from the wars
And the disasters
By the millions now,

But your kind always
Moved. The oracles
Were only people

Stoned on Earth’s gasses,
Addled, then often
Dead by overdose.

The hedges didn’t
Care for the poet
Or the homeless poor.

Things run wild right now.
Armadillos spread
Into northern lands.

Temperate species
Of insects invade
The Arctic that once

Was pristine enough,
Blank enough, to be
Exemplary waste.

A red butterfly
Lands on these oil drums
Rusting in scrap heaps

Sinking in tundra.
A man on crutches
Sits down beside it,

And the scene is set
For a prize-winning
Landscape photograph.