Bad News

By Ellen Girardeau Kempler

 

In one stop-
action second
you
spin
in
slow
motion
over the sharp edge
of knowing.

There was then
& there is now.

No scrabbling back
up the cliff face.

No rewind button.

No cartoon-stopping
on the way down.

No spaceship
to beam you away.

No, the pressure
is in the here
& now.

Like the whole ocean
bearing down.

Like chloroform-cotton.

Like a pin
piercing you,
straight through
the thorax.

 

 

Called “a timely and powerful selection of climate poetics,” Ellen Girardeau Kempler’s first book, Thirty Views of a Changing World: Haiku + Photos, was published in December 2017 by Finishing Line Press. In 2016, she won Ireland’s Blackwater International Poetry Prize and received honorable mention in Winning Writers’ Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. She posts a daily haiku and photo “anti-selfie” @placepoet on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @goodnewsmuse or visit her website at gold-boat.com.

Photo credit: By Sam Shere (1905–1982) – Zeppelin-ramp de Hindenburg / Hindenburg zeppelin disaster, Public Domain.