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Change
Scrub the rock with glacial ice until the granite’s smooth and bare.
Let the river cut through earth until it leaves a canyon there.
Let volcanic lava flows raise islands from the trackless sea.
Let the wind carve window rocks through which the world’s eyes can see.
Earthquakes, floods and hurricanes, tectonic plates and forest fire,
Countless years of decaying plants to form a peat-bogged moorland mire.
Shoreline sand raised up as mountains, which in turn erode to sand.
Lightning, sinkholes, limestone caverns, shape, create, reshape the land.
Big Bang, asteroids, dark matter, solar winds and lunar seas.
Black holes, comets, supernovas, planets, suns and galaxies,
Jet streams, tides and ocean currents, clouds—more kinds than one can name,
Change is nature’s way of breathing , nothing ever stays the same.
Some will say that’s how God made it. Others call it random chance.
Either way the world keeps spinning as it joins the cosmic dance.
You and I are changing with it, growing older, passing on.
Things once thought to be eternal, here today, tomorrow gone.
When we like the way things are we want to keep the status quo,
Even though the science tells us death will follow as we go.
When things cease to change, they die from what is known as entropy.
Climate change and all the rest are part of how we came to be.
Don’t succumb to the deception climate change leads to a grave,
Lest we kill the very thing our good intentions tried to save.
None of this means that we ought to keep polluting, heaven’s no!
Clean the air and atmosphere! But let the ice caps ebb and flow.
Without change the world will perish. Change is what sustains us all.
Human life is strong, resilient, even when seas rise and fall.
If one thousand years from now another ice age should arrive,
Humans will adapt as always, not to just survive, but thrive.
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James A. Tweedie is a retired pastor living in Long Beach, Washington. He has written and published six novels, one collection of short stories, and three collections of poetry including Mostly Sonnets, all with Dunecrest Press. His poems have been published nationally and internationally in The Lyric, Poetry Salzburg (Austria) Review, California Quarterly, Asses of Parnassus, Lighten Up Online, Better than Starbucks, Dwell Time, Light, Deronda Review, The Road Not Taken, Fevers of the Mind, Sparks of Calliope, Dancing Poetry, WestWard Quarterly, Society of Classical Poets, and The Chained Muse. He was honored with being chosen as the winner of the 2021 SCP International Poetry Competition.
This is a great poem on what nature has in store for us and the uselessness of attempts to change the natural flow involved. I was particularly enthralled with the phrase “Change is nature’s way of breathing…” Adjustments to nature is exactly the recipe for survival and for thriving in the process. You provided us a detailed depiction of reality. I have a list of those who need to pay heed to these lessons.
A finely wrought poem, James.
Thanks for the read.
So true. I loved this poem. Thank you!
Excellent, James! I actually hadn’t heard anyone explain it in quite this way before. And the eight-meter lines seem to fit a poem of this sort. It’s fun to read, and enlightening.
For matters more dire than any yet discussed, take a look at Geoengineering Watch. The main point is that humans must stop manipulating nature immediately, or else we arrive much more rapidly at the disaster climate changers think they can prevent. You are right, of course, James, about not polluting, which just means taking better care of our trash and making less of it. Your poem is a triumph in octometer! I have never been able to write 8-foot lines that don’t break apart, but you have many here that carry through to the end of the line. In those that don’t, you vary syntax expertly, so as to create varied yet natural rhythms. Enjoyed it thoroughly.
Pastor James, thank you for this enjoyable and informative poem. I admire your call for moderation in our response to change (the penultimate stanza). One criticism: There should not be an apostrophe in “heavens, no!”
What is obvious to you, James, is something many people cannot understand: climate change has been with us always. What’s worse is that predicting dire climate change is not even a scientific proposition — it’s just too vague. If one has a theory, then one must make a prediction that is implied by the theory, and the prediction must be very specific. Part of the problem is that many of our current batch of fearmongers do not understand the difference between climate and weather. The only thing they get right is that when people are afraid, they are much more easily manipulated and controlled, and that is precisely the kind of climate in which they like to operate. A while back Mike Bryant provided a long list of climate predictions made by the scientistic community that did not come true. Although I recycle as much as I can, I wonder sometimes how much of this material is actually sorted. Plastic alone comes in at least a half dozen types. Only in China, where slave labor is available, is this even a possibility. I suspect that the hot air generated by Leftist politicians is much more dangerous than any emissions produced by my light pickup truck.
This not-so-common octameter verse was a nice change of pace to read.
excellent poem:
we cannot stop erosion,
but we need not make it worse,
we cannot stop volcanic action
but we need not cut all the trees,
we must go from here to there
so let us take the bus,
the tide waits for no man
so we all must go with the flow.
It’s amazing how much humans now know compared to how little we knew even one hundred years ago, but we always lose sight of how little we know compared to how much we could know. Thanks for providing this great cosmic perspective.
Delightful as usual. I love the way you skillfully trace the science from the Big Bang through cloud formation and everything in between.