(at the final climate summit)
by Akeith Walters
I look
out a window smudged by cataracts
at the browning of green east Texas pines.
At one time so robust, they lean in clusters now
like overly elderly brothers at a family reunion,
diminished and thinner, standing with stiff arms
thrown around each other’s shoulders
for that last snapshot tribute to remaining alive.
I touch
an abandoned spiderweb in the corner of the sill
where the ancient carcass of a bee lies on its side.
We’ll be fine, though,
as Mom and Dad would always say.
At least the trees are not charred black.
And at least my parents did not live to see
so many tan needles stuck on dry-sap bark,
waiting to fall near the dusty halls of all of this,
their first and last home.
I hear
the desert has returned to the Kansas prairies,
grasslands blown away
beyond any thought of being a dustbowl.
Maybe this year, though,
the coastal fires will disappear,
swallowed by the hunger of a rising sea
even if the glacial melt has begun
the slow clotting of chlorophyll
in all the veins of the world.
Still for now,
the stubborn collards greens may persist.
It seems they too remain embittered
as they also resist with their own uncertain hold
in the drier dirt under a hotter sun.