Anything About It… by M.A. Schaffner

Anything About It

-1-

We are all here together with the cold

waiting for our day of spring then dreading

what summers have become. It’s not the heat

but the morbidity, the knowledge that

the intervention might have come too late.

It’s political, really, this lobby

for gentler seasons and native species.

So far the votes call for lower mileage

and shorter life-lists, for which the app

can only become cheaper by the year.

Ask not what you can do for your planet

but how many years remain in which to play

an ever-quicker killer in that game

where aliens try to claim our precious world.

-2-

The struggle continues but no one knows

where or even why. On any given day

the roles of oppressor and oppressed change;

justice switches partners with tradition.

Oh how we mourn the politically correct

taking the side of rabbits against hawks.

Then hawks show their pest control credentials

and courts rule again, and yet again.

Some days you want to live to see the end;

there’s no end until the end of us.

A car pulls into the driveway and parks

where horses once stood on filthy flagstones

breathing untainted air. I could go on,

and will until I can’t, though it still will.

M. A. Schaffner has work recently published or forthcoming in The Hollins Critic, Magma, Tulane Review, Gargoyle, and The Delinquent. Other writings include the poetry collection The Good Opinion of Squirrels, and the novel War Boys. Schaffner spends most days in Arlington, Virginia or the 19th century.

1 thought on “Anything About It… by M.A. Schaffner”

bz niditch on March 16, 2014 at 3:44 AM said:

A quality controlled environmental poem needed in this world.
BZ Nidich

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