by Glen Martin Fitch
Well, no one really got the joke at first.
As fields burnt brown,
as birds fell from the sky,
as winds blew hotter,
children cried of thirst.
We lied to them,
but they knew we would die.
Then trees went up like matches,
rivers shrank,
the cities crumbled.
Shaken so, we couldn’t stand.
The day was night.
The geysers stank.
By then the ground
became too hot to touch.
"We're moving!"
someone yelled.
Then each gut felt that tugging sense
as bumper cars collide.
Just so, the earth,
undone at every welt,
abandoned us
on molten seas to glide.
The joke?
Who first perceived
amid our screams
the world had come apart,
right at the seams?
(Is this the surfacing of repressed anger or just my fear of accepting the theory of continental drift?)
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ABOUT THE POET ~
Glen Fitch is a 16th Century poet lost in the 21st Century. Born near Niagara Falls, educated in the Catskills, thirty years on the Monterey Bay he now lives in Palm Springs. Retail not academics has paid the bills. Someday he will finish Spenser's "The Fairie Queene."
Last updated August 23, 2011