Kevin Swanwick, In Praise of Folly
Kevin Swanwick, in Praise of Folly Podcast
Global Weirding
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Global Weirding

from Barbara Ungar's, Save Our Ship, The Ashland Poetry Press, 2019
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Global Weirding
— —. — —. — —.

And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
                 — Yeats


Some still do not believe
in the weather. Mass

hallucination? Sump pumps
who’d dream them up?

Crammed in a musty cellar
velvet and cobwebs,

the roundelay of denial.
Our passports to the dreamtime

cancelled. Let the clocks take trains.
Let spacetime bulge around us

like dolphins caught in tuna nets.
Let lobsters let other lobsters out

of lobster pots at the bottom of the sea.
Could those gravitational waves

we heard at last from silver apples
really be the music of the spheres?

                           — Barbara Ungar

Used by permission of the author.

This poem is from poet Barbara Ungar’s Save Our Ship, The Ashland Poetry Press, 2019. Available in paperback at bookstores and online here.

Curator’s comment: The discernible effects of climate change on earth are arriving at a rate that seems to correlate with the rate of new discoveries in astrophysics about the possible nature of our universe. This poem expresses the inherent contradictions and attendant frustration associated with the astonishingly large gap between evidence and human beliefs with a humor that bites, as it should.


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