If We Don’t Navigate This as a World

Said Larry Fink of BlackRock

About the outbreak of war—

Then everything could contract,

A warning to billionaires—

But what’s really interesting

Is that phrasing, as a world.

What did you say? Come again?

Antiglobalists might shriek,

But there’s a necessity

And a higher register

Of arrogance in the phrase.

As if people were the world,

As if humans are a world,

A single organism,

Capable to pull itself

Together, a singular

World, a whole world, this whole world.

Earth would laugh, if a world could.