I live in Mexico. We just changed over to DST today—a few weeks after the U.S. did. As though DST isn’t complicated enough, countries get to arbitrarily decide when to switch to it. Obviously, this poem was written during the fall switchover, not the spring.  I’ve never been able to remember which is switching on, which switching off.  At any rate, this is not my daily NaPoWriMo poem as it wasn’t written today.

Saving Daylight

After altering the course of rivers,
moving or removing coastlines,
forests, ozone-protection,
minerals and fossil fuel,
we look for what next to change
and notice time.

(Perhaps time, a manmade concept anyway,
can be less-devastatingly tampered with?)

There are those who know
better than God or nature
when light is needed
and they have set the world right.

We are saving daylight
all over the world,
taking it from the morning’s wallet
and transferring it
to a back pocket.

Led like blind lambs,
we change our clocks,
lost in dark mornings
so games of golf or tennis
can be played well past
the natural end of day.

Gardeners and house builders
climb the hills to work
lighting their ways with flashlights,
in search of that lost morning hour of light.

Like sheep made clumsy, stumbling over stiles,
schoolchildren’s toes
feel for cobblestones in the dark
between street lamps
spaced a block apart.

as, like investors too anxious
to save up for a rainy day,
a world in the dark
makes forced deposits every morning,
withdraws them, interest free, each evening.
Her animals and birds and tribes
lost to schemes
carefully planned.