Climate Change Poem 1

Sunset in my neighborhood, Dec. 2005

Two global events are occurring on September 24, 2011:

1. Moving Planet, a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis.


2. 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a demonstration/celebration of poetry to promote serious social, environmental, and political change.


I thought: Why not do both?

Barring an emergency, I am posting from midnight to midnight, one poem per hour (at any time during that hour). That's starting from 00:00-01:00 and ending at 23:00-24:00 Eastern Time today.

All the poems are sonnets. Each takes its cue from an article dealing with climate change. The articles had been posted beginning on September 15 -- the date of the 24-hour Climate Reality Project that inspired me to do this -- to September 19, the day I drafted the twenty-fourth poem.


The poem for Hour 1 takes its cue from "New atlas shows extent of climate change" (John Vidal, Guardian, Sept. 15, 2011) and "Times Atlas 'wrong' on Greenland ice" (Richard Black, BBC News, Sept. 19, 2011).

The Warming Island
(Uunartoq Qeqertaq)

The globe that I possess is out of date,
With lands renamed by wars and politics,
But now more changes come. Ice floes abate.
For there arose, back in two-thousand-six,

"The Warming Island," listed now within
the Comprehensive Atlas of the World.
This volume has been raising quite a din.
Throughout the Earth, new maps have been unfurled

That show more river sections drying out:
The Rio Grande, the Colorado, Yellow,
Tigris, fallen to a plague of drought.
Antarctic ice shelves break with thundered bellow.

The Atlas from the Times depicts a wilt.
Perhaps our new geography is silt.

Audio (1:12):

Part of the Solution website (chosen at random)
"31 Ways To Recycle Your Home Waste" (Marina at Eco-Office Gals, Aug. 7, 2011).
Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other JourneysPromote Your Page Too Vol. 1, Deviations: Covenant (2nd Ed.), Vol. 2, Deviations: Appetite, Vol. 3, Deviations: Destiny, Vol. 4, Deviations: Bloodlines, Vol. 5, Deviations: TelZodo, Vol. 6 and conclusion: Deviations: Second Covenant.Free downloads at the Deviations website (click here for alternate link), Smashwords, and Manybooks.

Proud participant, Operation E-Book Drop (provides free e-books to personnel serving overseas. Logo from the imagination and graphic artistry of K.A. M'Lady & P.M. Dittman); Books For Soldiers (ships books and more to deployed military members of the U.S. armed forces); and Shadow Forest Authors (a fellowship of authors and supporters for charity, with a focus on literacy). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.