Lights blinking on
In the otherwise dark sky
Lights in the mind
The sky mind
Strange news flashes
Breaking stories
Let's listen in
To the parliament of monkeys
Shouting down the only little monkey
Who has a decent plan
For surviving the day
Good morning honorable monkeys
Good afternoon
Good evening
Good night
Good-bye
Don't forget your manners
Don't forget your flags
And your bandaids
The islands are burning
The people are leaving
Their houses are burning
The ferries are waiting
Their eyes are terrified
Sad, angry, defeated
Bloodshot eyes eyes eyes
The firefighters are saying
You can't go back
This place is a loss
There is no one left for us to save
And while we sailed away
We saw how bad it was
The whole sky lit up
It was red and glowing
Like nothing anyone had ever seen
Make your peace
Count your loved ones
Count your days of difference
You will never come back
Sit on your bundle and cry
Like you never cried before
Cry for all the people who can't cry
Cry for the planet
Cry for your fifth grade teacher
Cry for your dead father
Cry for your broken heart
Cry for your ancestors
Cry for your friends
Who had to leave their islands
Cry for the ones who aren't welcome
Cry for the man sitting in prison
Serving out a sentence of
6 billion, three hundred and seven million,
Seven hundred and twenty thousand seconds
Cry for the wounded deer
Cry for the filthy river
Cry for all the ones who hurt someone they loved
Cry for the clearcut
Cry for no good reason
Cry for nothing and no one
Let your sorrow clear the sky
Then (I promise you)
Once the sky is clear
You will begin to see them
The lights blinking on
In the otherwise dark sky
...............
Why I wrote this poem:
Line 31 shifts to first person (plural). The burning islands are no longer "breaking news" but this calamity is happening to us. The shift happens when the firefighters are saying "You can't go back". That personalizes the crisis. The speaker feels the magnitude of that prohibition. We can't go back and we can't stay. There is nothing to do but sit on what we were able to salvage as we sail away forever. That is the climax of this poem which is a wake-up call. We, as a species are beginning to pass a point of no return in our collective business on Earth. The next shift starts with the line "Make your peace". Now the speaker lists appropriate responses to the calamity: things to take cognizance of and then things to cry for. Crying becomes the lattice of the poem upon which all of the pain and suffering of a botched existence can be hung. Crying clears the mind, frees the spirit. The sky is no longer a super-heated alien sky over an incinerating island, but it is clear, like after a thunderstorm. The poem is cyclical in a way, but only in a way - something has changed: We are back to being apprised of the lights in the sky, which are impersonal in the opening of the poem, but now we are being invited to see them as the lights of some kind of dawning of awareness of an alternative to where the poem escorted us. In other words, at the end of the poem we are not back where we started, we are in a better place.
Another way of putting this is: The character of the lights changes depending on our relationship to the shadow. In the beginning of the poem the lights represent "breaking stories", like the story of the fires in Italy, but the poem is not about that headline story (soon to be displaced by another headline story). As the reader (and the poet) journey through the poem, honoring grief as the great cleansing emotion, the lights become lights of illumination and possibilities. I have always taken the position that we will only make it to "the next day" if we morn what we must leave behind. People who straddle or try to hold on to old truths or old dysfunctional realities will remain stuck reading breaking stories (stories of the worlds brokenness), instead of assuming responsibility for what is happening, and for what kind of world unfolds.
(Article changed on Aug 12, 2021 at 9:30 AM EDT)
