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Seventh Assessment Report

September 23, 2019 By Samuel Miller McDonald Leave a Comment

Photo by Pawel Nolbert on Unsplash

June 29 2019

92° F

Oxford, England

1) 
 
It’s a slow rot—
A decay with many geneses.
There are so many pinpricks
where life seeps
out — pores
in a death mask —
that even the most scrupulous accountant, 
or even an infinitely patient scientist giving
the whole scope of her life to this task could not
count them.
It’s a lot, is what I’m saying.
But it’s not a rot, is it? 
It’s not one life giving itself to the 
flourishing of millions
of others.
It’s the opposite of that. 
And the product of this
anti-rot
is not a cycling of more and more life,
in and out upon itself. 
The opposite.

It’s a cyclone whose winds pull apart the cells
and molecules that
animate life to begin with.
Pulls them too far apart from one another,
beyond their many event horizons,

and unleashes fire that transforms
charred life into more charred life
— a cauterizing of wombs and skin —
ashes to ashes, charcoal to charcoal. 

It’s a clotting in those channels
where for 3,000,000,000 odd years
circulated lifeblood.
That’s the anti-rot.
And, also, it’s not slow. It’s not slow 
at all.
It’s the fastest thing there is.
Faster than
light
Faster than
bullets
Faster than superheroes.
Faster than life. 
I take it back. It’s not
a slow rot.
It’s a fast anti-rot and it’s coming to 
cleave us all.


2) 
 
When they made the aural background outside 
a nylon tent inside
a white-pine-copper-beech cathedral and became 
a net wove of sound holding
up all else:
I didn’t realize then how much I needed
the crickets.
 
When they still harmonized with the peepers
and the bullfrogs, 
I could not have guessed
how their slow — rather, rapid, immediate,
sudden — descent
to silence
would so perfectly, proportionately, align —
inversely, of course —
with the rising howl emanating from a
solid molten core of rage,
of fury raised from helpless pity 
in myself.
 
How is it, I wonder now and did not occur
to me then,
that the scraping of insect legs and
the guttural grunt of amphibian throats
— mostly occurring for the same reasons —
could be part of the complex of things
holding at bay the absolute
loss of possibility for redemption
I see in my own
species and the degenerative alienation
that accompanies such a death of faith.
 
And on those rare moments I bring it up,
out of the blue, 
cut in and give up my standing,
the same silence, the same
exact silence mirrored there with people.
 
And that’s fine. This quiet 
is just the dismal prologue. We’re just
getting the subtle synopsis,
previewing the banal silence that now
will surely pervade many
uncounted millennia
to come. 
 
In those millions of years there may not be
chirps and croaks
and chitchat
(the timer on my smartphone just chirped in
sad mockery of crickets and until
I press the button will do so
until the battery depletes
until the mechanism wears out until
the lithium degrades until the aluminum
rusts until the pieces fall apart)
but there will still fill this space
a constant background noise — not a net
but umbrella is maybe what it is —
over everything, the sound 
of thunder, 
of waves crashing together, of rocks
grinding together, and 
wind crying through clasping dust.

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Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Poetry

About Samuel Miller McDonald

Samuel Miller McDonald is a geography PhD candidate at University of Oxford studying the politics of energy transition. He is an editor at The Trouble and a writer. His work is here & tweets @sjmmcd.

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