Earth Day Rant in Rhyme
BY BOB BREULS
Do not touch your face/ Don’t forget to say grace.
To save ourselves who has a clue/ Of what on Earth to do/ Why not stampede for toilet tissue?/ To the main topic here this is no discontinuity/ And to mark Earth Day’s first half century/ Why not consider a bike build subversity?/ Ride sustainability in perpetuity.
No ransom for royalty will mine be/ Nor lock-it-up pathology/ Not Harley or Honda or Norton Commando/ But the lightweight familiar/ Low carbon to go./ From random origins re- integrating/ Derailleur, freewheel, basket for freight bearing/ Soon very likely it’s calling for riding/ And the bell still can ring./ New brakes and cables/ The seat looks like torture/ But entirely consistent with enhancing our future/ Sustainable practice in practice!/ Environmental crisis prophylaxis!
On this rare and sacred sanctuary/ Our esteemed enduring Big Rock#3/ The lately most salient reality/ Is a pair of close siblings calling more frequently/ Each indisposed to gestures of leniency/ Make no mistake their common ontogeny/ Pandemics and climate change and what other progeny?/ For much higher impact the twosome synergetic/ Now target the inimical myopic diathetic/ High caution to many conventions endemic.
Who can doubt it, we’re today in a crucible/ The experience now could be just dress rehearsal/ Will the pandemic itself take a reversal? / And where does virus definition/ Include stasis as condition? / Among the instruments of adjustment/ A virus is a perfect complement/ For restoring peace on this firmament/ Why choose then, resentment, lamentment? / For responses judicious and decent/ There is good record of precedent.
The once familiar “normal”/ So easy to invoke/ Reinstated, undebated/ Means ever more of gag and choke/
There’s formidable arsenal to provoke./ For some reason lately, a misunderstanding/ Our apprehending needs expanding/ There’s inversion of perception/ Demanding honest interrogation/ Identify contagion, identify aberration/ And which is defence, which prosecution?
Homeostasis fits well in the Earthly equation/ Ever useful, effective, self calibration/ Consider James Lovelock’s wise surmise/ In fact no big surprise/ Regarding Gaia he did hypothesize/ Planet Earth as living entity/ Almost in herself, singularity/ Expect then, with alacrity, tenacity/ Prompt response of immunity/ To thoughtless
societal effrontery.
Last year, all heard it/ Eleven years remained/ For an anthropocene unrestrained/ A dangerous, too costly imbalance/ Much too long maintained/ The pushing of plastic and singing ka-ching/ As cultural
purpose, how inspiring ?/ A recipe only for more grief to bring.
•••••••( i )•••••••
When arrive the legions of benevolent alien/ To encamp and proceed in every nation/ On thorough campaigns of brain transplantation/ Any limit to the dreamscape imagination?/ And how deep is the mind’s addiction/ To the most outrageous fiction?/ But if such good fortune ever eventuates/ Please save me a place/ In the first line of candidates
•••••••( ii )•••••••
How did airtravel become so sanctified?/ A Late cornerstone of economies/ Fostering capricious dependencies/ Precluded through all human history/ A response now to a deficiency?/ Manifestation of a desperation?/ Where prosperity surpasses creativity and imagination?/ For now it’s a dose of banality/ Though once a sensation/ Converging with a TV generation/ Deep torpor on the couch, but poised with remote/ All have acquaintance with this anecdote.
Extrapolate to a bizarre possibility/ Slight stretch to the venerated normalcy/ A brief holiday in a remote galaxy/ Or ten days on beautiful Alpha Centauri?/ Equally vacuous, specious, injudicious/ One might choose Sirius/ IT IS after all, ALL ABOUT US/ For US right now its no sacrifice/ Externalize costs and roll the dice/ Transit a STEAL at twice the price/ Many the options exoticus/ For us of a culture capricious.
So be not deterred/ All costs are deferred/ Simply a shift of depredations/ Bequeath it all to future generations/ Promote further the state of desolation.
How keenly felt the tough privations/ By those avoiding such vacations?/ If they’re needed to “save your neck”/ Best consider VR tech/ Or support your local holodeck.
•••••••( iii )•••••••
Swat not that mosquito/ Do an earthworm rescue/ They fit this earthscape better than we do/ To be here they have more right than we do/ It’s a heavy charge that in essence/ To many would be a big offence/ Any volunteers as counsel for defense?
You find no earthworm administrations/ Of edentate regulations/ Do they insist on air conditionations?/ How much hope of their support/ For yet another airport?/ Or PT lumber for garden, playground or dock/ Or the big commute and more gridlock?/ Or would they often concede/ That THERE IS a “noxious weed”/ And with big consensus, all agreed/ Chemical warfare will meet the need/ How bad is earthworm halitosis/ From digital world hypnosis?/ Their own boredom and desperation/ For flash and dazzle stimulation/ Or expressing that a life well spent/ Is a craze of commitment to synthetic scent?/
There is INDEED much malodorum/ Why not slag the real odium?/ For us of current edition humanity/ Knowing the factor/ Of tumorgenic or hormone disruptor/ Elicits “Why on earth would that matter?”
•••••••••••••
Earth Day EVERY day, all must insist/ A denial of futures if the choice is resist/ A tragedy is no inevitability/ All can be worthy of Rock# Three/ We’re all of the same waters/ From the primal asteroid showers.