By Late August
The cove is a morning-after scene,
as if mother nature partied her way
through July and now sprawls half-
conscious, damp cloth of marsh grass
covering her eyes. Feathers everywhere.
The water is low, drunk up and thick
with fowl. Mallards, mergansers,
Canada geese tip headfirst into muck
like they’re looking for loose change
between couch cushions. She rolls
in the pressing heat but doesn’t rise,
wrung out, vexed by what inevitably
comes next: a reckoning. The crisp
intervention of September will arrive
shortly, blazing with purpose and
clearing breezes. She’ll have to find
her second wind. Stand watch over
the lake as loons learn the air.
As maples burn, and tremulous
poplars drop coins at her feet.
On NPR this afternoon
Jane Fonda said her body feels such despair about the crisis
she is dedicating the rest of her life (“not very long!”
awkward laugh-cry) to climate activism. Next to
the radio in the kitchen, chicken roasting in the oven,
I feel it too: chest-clenched, neck-knotted, head-
split alarm that all our failures to live right
are now roosting. Do something, I whisper
for the thousandth time but can only watch
myself watching the light beyond the window,
a pathless patch of sky,
birds and then no birds.
Do something—
Jillian Hanson is a poet, collage artist, and creative consultant with Blue Sky Black Sheep. She lives on a big lake in Maine with her husband, and is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. Her poems and collages have been published (or are forthcoming in) The Meaning of Home and The Meaning of Things (Blue Sky Press), crtl + v journal, Wild Roof Journal, and the Stonecoast Review, among others.
Header photo by Robert Jones, courtesy Pixabay.
