Established in Canada in 1998 by the League of Canadian Poets, National Poetry Month encourages communities to celebrate poetry and its vital place in Canada's culture.
This year’s theme, set by the League, is weather. From the website of the LoCP:
“Celebrate National Poetry Month 2024 with the theme of WEATHER. Through sun, snow, rain, wind, fog, and many other iterations, we find the captivating presence of weather. With poetic flair, weather dictates the rhythms of our lives from coast to coast.”
The poem below is brought to you through the Poetry Café, a program that was originally run through the OAC. The OAC has a large archive of chapbooks from the Poetry Café, and we are in the process of adding them to the Digital Arts Archive. Please visit! If you wish to use any of the material in the archive, please contact the OAC. Materials are copyrighted and you will need the artists permission to use the work.
WARMING ©ERNIE ENOLA
Denial
Is it warmer? Has it changed? Doomsayers or valid science?
examine evidence, fear the consequences Cataclysmic climatic events
Not in a year, so why bother
Not in a decade, so why do anything Not going to happen to us
We have the money, the science
No, not to us.
Watch documentaries, read the journals Attend a lecture. Yeah, nod your head, they should do something
but fifty years from now I'll be dead So who cares, leave it to my kids they'll survive.
Too bad if Bangladeshis drown
or Africans starve
Can't be bothered, drive me home
Turn up the thermostat
switch on the lights.
Turn on the T. V.
Famine in China!
That's them, not me.
Awakening
That's quite a drought on the Prairies No water in California. Crops fail
One hell of a series of hurricanes smashing oil rigs. Flash floods
Storms so bad planes can't fly
Hey! Supermarkets short on food,
no gas to drive elsewhere
can't eat my lawn or my bushes
Arctic meltdown
Oceans acid, few fish to eat
Dried out fields, cattle dying
No water in taps, or rivers
money and cars useless
the weak and old die of heat
while air conditioners sit idle
impotent
we swelter in our homes
pleading for help, but
no one left to fetch or carry
Helpless, millions start to die.
Aftermath
What happened to our civilization?
Simple
We didn't believe, did nothing
Couldn't affect us only them
Wouldn't demand our leaders "Do"
not just make a plan, not just make a profit,
not hold a conference, not delay
but DO
Pity, many cities are under water
Pity, forests have burned
Pity the temperature is still going up
Pity, the oceans are flooding crop lands
Pity, we are out of fuel
Pity millions of animals died
Billions of humans died
but they created the apocalypse
If only! If only we had listened
If only we had acted.
