Poem After Watching An Inconvenient Truth With My Students
       

If you're writing a poem about a tree,
you're writing an elegy. All our theories

about creation are tools to justify
our own existence by its cost.

We say the fittest survive. We say
nature makes choices this way.

A student tells me we can't stop
climate change because we can't stop

God, can't choose the way he wishes
to end us in our world. All of the theories

we believe about God are fired
by brimstone, are ways for us

to disappear our responsibility. Inside
of the field we can see is another field

we can't see, a silence that has nothing
to do with us. We could choose. What

we could save if we stopped believing
that only what belongs to us is holy.

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Copyright © 2021 Emma Bolden All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission