By Gerard Sarnat
PROMPT — During COVID-19 ...
i. Pandemic Weather Hall Pass
Perhappened portmanteau
of frenzy-fed megachurch’s
hifalutin well as cavalier words
about, Now’s your time to emerge
before markets become submerged -- but
COVID’s silent killer still remains whether
we can see it or nada. So I try momentary escape:
Home-schooled observances are being experienced
through extra levitation gears which grab my attention
since instead of lazing around in squeamish queues BBQ’d
all day, Gerardo is granted by Goddy just one permission slip to visit
quicksilver Milky Way courtesy of A.O.C.’s Green New Deal throw-weight
pugnaciously sucks black fossil-fueled squid’s tony Sack Sequestered Fauci ink sacs.
ii. Among The Museum of Things I Wanna Forget This Rainy Season, But Cannot
Knee-deep in water, Rebecca and her son -- lucky not to be an orphan now -- worked land dotted with decomposed stalks bent from the force of surging mud. “It’s all rotten,” she said, holding a large pan filled with discolored sludgy corn that she hoped to mill after it dried.
But these new inland oceans seem not unique to those Janeiros in Mozambique or “elsewhere” since 30 USA states’ predicted to experience floods already pummeling livestock/ harvests of Midwest farmers who can least afford it in the face of current tariffs and low crop prices.
With Great Plains early-melting blizzards, cyclones plus typhoons as well as Dorothy’s
usual tornados, folks within the Missouri-Mississippi River Basins where towns fought
but failed to save breached levees admit, “Despite airdropped hay, it’s over for us.”
Roads impassable, bridges swamped essentially puts hardworking Iowa plus Nebraska
citizens under house arrest --- except for those few very rich Big Agra businessmen
with helicopters to travel around buying out bargain-basement single-family farms.
Bringing global warming back home, the 2017 U.S. Geological Survey report says
between 1/3 - 2/3 of Southern California beaches will succumb to sea-level rise
by end of this century unless fossil fuel emissions are significantly reined in.
To be painfully specific, “Zuma and Redondo [where my wife and I have a beachfront condo]
and Del Mar, among many others, could all then disappear. They will likely be “completely
eroded (up to existing coastal infrastructure or sea-cliffs)” with neighborhoods swallowed.
With the youngest of 5 grandchildren just born, last night 3 generations committed a huge chunk of our assets to seed climate change projects. I am trying to contact a college dorm-mate who lived across the hall: since he is Al Gore, we look forward to getting advice about wise stewardship.
Gerard Sarnat won the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for a handful of recent Pushcarts, plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published in academic-related journals, plus national and international publications. He has authored the collections Homeless Chronicles: From Abraham to Burning Man (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). Gerry is a physician who has built and staffed clinics for the marginalized, as well as being a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently, he is devoting energy/ resources to deal with climate change justice. Gerry has been married since 1969 and has three kids and six grandsons. He is looking forward to future granddaughters.