Tag Archives: poem about global warming

Divine Providence, for dVerse Poets

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Image by  Alireza Dolati

Divine Providence

The wings of destiny are stilled, waiting for our play.
Astonished at our slowness, confused at the delay.
Disappointment in mankind by now’s a usual thing.
What new human horror will the future bring?

We’ve poisoned oceans, sullied air and burdened earth with junk.
Enough to put Ma Nature in a perpetual funk.
She balks and sends out warriors to try to curb our lusts,
but still mankind continues to turn shouldn’ts into musts.

She now sees she was misguided in creating human fools,
with all of their excesses flaunting all her rules.
Soon she’ll find another way to try to clear her slate of them
as destiny stands waiting to see what is the fate of them.

For dVerse Poets, we were to choose a Spanish term to use for the subject of a poem. In Spanish,  Divina Providencia means destiny with choices and spiritual interventions. My poem is about how mankind has unfortunately chosen to respond  to that divine providence.

Tough Love for RDP, June 22, 2024

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Tough Love

By her violent hurricanes and the ice caps’ thaw,
by the massive flooding and the hungry maw
of fires burning cruelly, devouring trees and houses,
she tries to rid the human race of habits it espouses.
Mother Nature’s angry and she’s tried to let us know,
but still we do not listen, for we are rather slow.
We’ve been such naughty children, not picking up our toys.
Perhaps we’ll get the message from new tactics she deploys.

From Wuhan to Limerick, we’re forced to stay inside,
reading the statistics of how many more have died.
She takes away our playthings: airplanes and sailing ships,
closes all our restaurants, taking away our tips.
She shuts down all the factories, cleaning up the air
so we could breathe again outside, if only we could dare.
Hunkered down inside our homes, we try to find diversions.
No NBA games, but fewer temperature inversions.

We do not flood the roadways, tossing out our trash.
We avoid bars and restaurants, hoarding all our cash.
Give up all the driving—the freeway’s frantic rush,
avoiding the container stores and the mall’s mad crush.
With Amazon delivering only vital things,
we resurrect the pleasures that tradition brings.
Monopoly, Parcheesi, Pick-up-sticks and Rook.
Brother builds a model plane. Sis picks up a book.

Mom recycles plastic and refuses to buy more.
All excessive packaging piles up in every store
until they learn that they can go back to what once was
and rid the world of garbage, doing it because
we do not own the world you see. Instead, the world owns us.
We are just the part of it creating all the fuss.
Maybe if we clean our rooms, our mom will let us play
outside again with others, one unpolluted day.

For RDP: Tough

No Skin, For dVerse Poets, June 15, 2024: Fragment Poem

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No Skin

As it grows hotter year by year,
then month by month,
we hide in our caves for protection,
for there is no skin to our world.
The aqua sky?
Gone, my friends,
Replaced by  fire.
The mountains are obscured by fire,
obscured again by smoke that still, alas,
is not a skin.
No skin.  No.  No skin left for our world.
No skin.
Our water boils in its pipes. No cool succor there.
We are all caught in the too-long day
That  fades into inevitable night.
We lie awake,
our minds throbbing to music from the drum of the moon
that leads us into dreams
where we forget the large lie and remember, finally, that
the sins of the heart are not just theater
but reflect the sins of mankind,
who for purses of gold
have sold our world.
Now we all cook in the pan of their greed,
the protective skin of our world
sold off year by year
for yachts and palaces that share
the same vanished sky of the houses
where we cower for protection from that once-benevolent sun
under which in the past we spread ourselves to receive those rays
now turned lethal in this skinless world.

 

For this dVerse Poets prompt, we were to write a new poem that included 13 lines from a famous poem or one of our own old unpublished poems. I based my poem on  these fragments from a poem I wrote years ago entitled “Evil World Scenario.”

No skin there.
The aqua sky?
Gone, my friends,
Replaced by  fire.
No skin.  No.  No skin left for our world.
No skin.
We are all caught in the too-long day
That  fades into inevitable night.
We lie awake,
Our minds throbbing to music from the drum of the moon
That leads us into dreams–
Where we forget the large lie and remember, finally, that
The sins of the heart are just theater.

 

To read other poems written to this prompt, go HERE.

Stating the Obvious

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Stating the Obvious

We’ve hit a cosmic bottleneck and every day I rue it,
for I have the feeling that we will not make it through it.
They’ve indexed the world’s problems, but knowing that they’re there
seems to do very little in solving the nightmare.

We do not yield to pressure to try to cure the ills.
We only seem to kneel before the moneyed class’s wills.
We temper fear with hope that someone else will solve the puzzle
of the fact the whole damn world is staring down a muzzle.

Kids shoot other kids with guns but adults do not care
so long as the NRA sanctions the warfare.
We ban those from our borders who clean up all our messes,
then wonder why we’re drowning here in our own excesses.

Amazon sells refreshments as we all just sit and watch
as climate change keeps shifting the danger up a notch.
Meanwhile, the rich get richer and we ignore the poor
as the ones who need it least acquire more and more.

The polar caps are melting as California burns,
and in between, the drought and floods keep on taking turns.
Hurricanes, tornadoes and cyclones mount and mount,
raising the fatalities higher than we can count.

Nobody knows the answer for how to please us all,
yet we forget we all are one on this great blue ball.
If only we could find a way to even out the score
and give up some of what we’ve got so others can have more.

Sacrifice fossil fuel to give the world a chance.
Tear down the oil derricks. Replace them with plants.
Make sure the rich pay taxes on a par with all the rest.
Admit that we don’t own the Earth. We are just its guest!!!

 

Prompts today are temper, index, cosmic, bottleneck, kneel and refreshments.

Global Warning

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Global Warning

A yeasted dough that cannot rise higher than its leaven,
the splendid sun climbs up the sky but never reaches heaven.
Blissful nature mystery enough without religions.
Who needs holy doves when they’ve been given carrier pigeons?

Why name the mighty miracle that holds us in its clasp?
By giving it a human form, we thus reduce its grasp.
Nature is not our mother nor the universe our father.
Our presence is precarious and far below their bother.

Tough reality is what we live in day-to-day.
Born under the brutal sun and nourished by its ray,
nonetheless it does not hear us when we pray, simply because
nature only can respond to what mankind does.

Prompts today are splendid, blissful, mighty, precarious, tough and heaven.

Death Knell

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Death Knell

Living too near a factory
may cause distress olfactory,
thus magnifying baleful thoughts
in the minds of those “have nots”
of purdy sorts who need not smell
these odors from the fires of Hell.
Who cares what vapors invade air
in places where no rich are there?
The vile winds hum a savage tune.
Thus goes the world to pot and ruin
with mankind born, then gone too soon.
death knell
farewell

Prompt words today are purdy, magnifying, baleful and factory.
Purdy: disagreeably self-important (dialectal, England) or, alternate spelling of “purty,” or pretty.

Divisible

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Divisible* 

Our species has malfunctioned and we’ve finally met our match.
It’s waited all these years for the right time for it to hatch.
First there was the ice age where we had to deal with frost,
but it seems like global warming is the place where we’ll be lost.
We’ve flaunted our dominion and must be reprimanded
It seems as though our prototype’s about to be disbanded.
It’s ironic that a virus so small that it’s invisible
might be the thing that proves that mankind might be divisible.


Divisible: capable of being divided by another number without a remainder.

Prompt words today are malfunction, flaunt, prototype, frost and match.

Trump Tower II

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Trump Tower II

The architecture of the house takes his needs to heart.
To create a perfect climate in every single part
was a top priority, so when the north winds blow,
within, he feels no ill-effects from gale or rain or snow.

He’ll find the ambient temperature is perfect day and night.
Summer, winter, spring or fall, be it day or night,
his family will not feel the cold, succumb to summer’s scorch
In the bedroom or the living room, the basement or the porch.

The sound control in every room functions without a hitch,
so when he whispers secrets, the staff can never snitch.
Noise produced in one room is not heard in any other.
He’s protected from Ivanka’s soaps and rock played by her brother.

All-in-all the ambience surrounds them like a glove—
be it balmy climate or all the sounds they love.
Bird song or the ocean or mixtures of the two.
What animal sounds they might crave—an auditory zoo.

Species may vanish off the earth but he will always hear them.
It’s nice to enjoy species without having  to be near them.
Doves cooing, elephants trumpeting, a lion’s hearty roar
might persuade a burglar to remain outside his door.

What cares he if the oceans rise and masses do not love it?
His house converts into a boat so you can float above it.
The whole world may freeze stiff or burn for all that he may care,
for he’ll be protected safely, tucked up in his fine lair.

Prompt words today are architecture,  ambient, succumb, snitch.

Christmas Cancelled!!!

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Christmas Cancelled!!!

Lower the pinãta. Bring the party to a halt.
Cease your roar of protest, for I’m not the one at fault
for curbing your frivolity and quashing all our fun.
If you need a scapegoat, Father Christmas is the one
who turned Rudolph out to pasture and retired his sleigh to blocks.
while Gaea, Christ and Santa Claus have some major talks.
The Christ child won’t be crowned this year. The elves are on vacation.
Santa will stay a figment of your imagination.
The only Santas left are those “Ho ho” ing for their wages.
St. Nicholas gave up the ghost when we put kids in cages.

He sold off Donner and Blitzen when we turned our backs
on nature’s other creatures: the elephants and yaks.
All the endangered creatures in the forest and the seas,
those crippled by pollution, global warming and disease.
He closed up his workshop as we squandered nature’s gifts,
deserted the North Pole as the glaciers formed their rifts.
Now bad boys won’t get presents and, alas, the good ones either.
We’re being banished to our rooms while nature takes a breather.
Will Christmas come another year? I guess we’ll wait and see.
Next year will we be perched on or turned over Santa’s knee?

Prompt words for today are crown, roar, fault and figment.

Rebuffing Human Nature

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Rebuffing Human Nature

Nature is overwhelmed by us, regretting what we’ve cost.
We’re clouding up her atmosphere and melting all her frost.
She’s showing she’s indignant now by arming every gun.
Before we even see them, I fear that they’ll have won.
Her armaments are minuscule, but nonetheless they’ll beat us.
Weapons need not be visible in order to defeat us.
Determining their actions, our leaders often stumbled.
They find it hard to face they’ve been outstrategized and humbled.
When this mess is over, one more mess will be presented.
Mother Nature will not quit ‘til mankind has repented––
cleaned up all its messes, ceased drilling for her oil,
stopped polluting water and messing with her soil.
If we do not listen and stubbornly persist
in annoying Mother Nature, we may cease to exist.

 

Prompts today are overwhelmed, indignant, now, determine and frost.