POEM: How Can We Sleep

How Can We Sleep

I’m sitting in a camp chair
on the concrete rectangle
I call my front porch.

The catbirds are squabbling
in the Adam’s needle;
the neighbor kids are shooting hoops.

I’m trying to read a book of poems
about the environmental crisis,
but my eyes are stinging from smoke

that has traveled all the way to Virginia
from wildifes in Quebec and Nova Scotia,
nearly a thousand miles away.

“The earth is not dying, it is being killed,
and those who are killing it
have names and addresses.”

Now one of the neighbor kids is crying.
Maybe she knows
our days are numbered.

/ / /

6 June 2023
Charlottesville VA