Zeitgeist
       

And then it wasn't just plastic
at Gore Point in the Antarctic (population: 0)
but at thirty thousand feet above
the Pyrenees (population: birds)
and in the lungs of every living
lunged creature to walk
or fly or swim the planet,
and then it was every poet
writing a love song for the nineties
or a ballad to overthrow the government
and still we bought houses in the floodplain,
went to the beach when we could.
Then it wasn't a story anyone
could bear hearing again,
not with the smoke and Amazon's delay
delivering air purifiers ordered with Prime.
The citizens huddled, not
together but in their private dens:
don't bother me, I'm writing a status update.
And they believed what they believed
about who was at fault,
and it's true many things also thrived
at this time: the tick,
jellyfish, I'm not
being facetious—and what burned
burned, and what entered
our lungs entered them silently, which
does not mean without
consequence, and then did
what it was going to do.

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Copyright © 2022 Rachel Richardson All rights reserved
from Ecotone
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission