Paying a (Heavy) Price for Climate Change, 3000 AD

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

[Update June 2nd 2017]: Yesterday, president Trump withdrew the USA from the Paris agreement on climate change. Such a step has been met with dismay by most countries around the world. Wie the president professes to be putting America and Americans first, it remains to be seen if that will prove the case or whether excessive carbon emissions may yet be the death of us all.] RT

As regular readers will know, I am revising some  poems that appear in my collection. An earlier version of today's poem first appeared in an anthology, Free-Falling, Poetry Now [Forward Press] 2006 and subsequently in my collection the following year. While there is a strong argument for leaving well alone, as I look at poems from a distance of several years or more, I sometimes feel the need to 'get it right'. Some readers, of course, will always prefer the original.

Now, we hear and read about climate change all the time.Yet how seriously do we take it? How committed are we to future generations?  Nor is climate all that's changing. Some would argue that humankind itself is being gradually eroded by complacency if not by by its own inhumanity.

Fatalism is humankind's worst enemy; we cannot blame our shortcomings on fate, only ourselves.

As for the planet, I suspect nature has ideas of its own ...

Whatever, there is no room for complacency; the well-being of future generations is at stake. Governments of the world and certain politicians with an invested interest in fossil fuels need declare those interests, get their priorities right and log into some positive thinking ... NOW.
  

PAYING A (HEAVY) PRICE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, 3000 AD

Preserved in ice, like some

prehistoric monster

poised to tread weeping clay,

dead water

Traces of green, shades of envy

to the probing eye

investigating its reappearance

and repercussions

Provoking alarm in Big Brother’s

desolate backyard

stretching endlessly, like

a yawning clay pit

Hysteria among humanoid

and robotic camps alike,

tugging at the archaeologist’s arm

to leave well alone

Preserved in ice, like some

prehistoric monster,

missed potential for all humanity;

Statue of Liberty

Copyright R. N. Taber 2006; 2013

[Note: An earlier version of this poem appears 1st eds. of  Accomplices To Illusion by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2007; 2nd (revised) e-edition in preparation.]