#945 - a sky so sweet

 

8.viii.22

945

3.218

a sky so sweet

 

today I learned

that rain everywhere is poisonous now

 

it’s the kind of thing you could have guessed

but maybe didn’t want to think too much about

 

had to hear it on the radio

 

everywhere is poisonous now

in the middle of the Pacific Ocean

snows falling on Antarctica

every drop, flake falling on this world

maybe some of the old old ice is okay

but that’s melting pretty fast too

 

there’s nowhere to escape

all precipitation

everything we drink or swim in

is full of the plastic foam

certain fires are fought with

it’s got a name

but

 

no more ozone hole I suppose

(or I mean, it’s less of a worry than it was

… and that has to be progress)

 

but this poison rain is falling everywhere

it’s not just landing on us

it’s saprise

all the pond life, all the seas

it’s in my cup of tea

 

do you remember in the old days

when – before water was clean to drink –

and people would drink beer

it was safer?

and that could help you forget

about the problem  

 

I don’t know what this stuff in the water is called

or I can’t remember

and if I did know what it was

possibly I couldn’t pronounce it

and if I could pronounce

I wouldn’t know how it worked anyway

I don’t have the training

 

it’s a bit of a joke

that it’s fire fighting foam though

that’s poisoned all the H2O on the planet

when we’re filling all of the sky up with smoke

and making the whole place hotter

what do you call those spirals?

 

past a tipping point

out of control

 

is this all a bit exaggerated though?

it was just a little news item

set me off

 

how bad is it?

it can’t be good

but honestly, I couldn’t tell you

 

of course, more generally

in the not-quite-infinite cosmos

that extends in every direction

away from our world and our atmosphere

poisonousness is something of a norm

 

just thinking about it makes you want to drink

 

you could say that

apart from our little blue dot

probably almost everything everywhere

is completely poisonous

… I mean of course from our point of view

(which is, for the purposes of this poem

all we’ve got to go on)

 

kind of makes you wonder

why we do the things we do

and how things got this far

 

could be good to pause for a think

 

once it was a sky so sweet

you’d cup it in your hands

 

I ask myself, the way a ghost will

is this the world we’ll have left?