On the President’s Announcement of Our Hashtag

By John Linstrom

The President announced we need to keep
some carbon in the ground; he sounded sure,

his raised and lowered index finger maybe
mimicking an oil rig I’ve seen

on my computer screen. I caught his talk
distilled at first, a single image meme,

hashtagged to my cell phone’s glowing face,
the floating phantom of a president

in light above this tiny glowing slab.
Such phones are made of matter. I forget

sometimes the way the world is swept for me,
the oil that forms the plastic, metals heaved

from mines, and heavy metals concentrated
to this short-term task. I hold it here—

the screen dims—it reminds me of the black
obsidian we’d often find in flakes

along the old ravine. We pretended
that was magic, too, but we really knew

it made the body of the place we played,
the mud’s black fingernails, skeletal

outcropped source of grounded mystic wonder.
That stone had been there for millennia.

Then we’d each lift a rock and toss it up
into the clicking branches, watch it fall

gleaming along a trail the trees had altered,
and catch it in our shirt-sleeve-guarded hands.

Later, we’d return the stones to the mud.
The soul of Earth is black like that, I think,

obsidian and coal and oil, the bridges
from molten core to surface, dinosaurs

to us. We listen to our President
on magic flakes we’ve swept from earth’s ravines.

The flakes can prophesy to how we’ve made
an end to all we’ll ever dream to make—

a human listening to the soil’s voice
might speak of moderation, or of love.

#KeepItInTheGround

Poet’s note: Written on the occasion of President Barack Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline, November 2015.

John Linstrom’s poems have recently appeared in Commonweal Magazine, Bridge Eight, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Dunes Review, and Narrative Northeast’s “Eco Issue.” In 2015, Counterpoint Press published his centennial edition of Liberty Hyde Bailey’s eco-philosophical manifesto, The Holy Earth, with a new foreword by Wendell Berry. He now has a collection of Bailey’s garden writings, The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion, forthcoming from Cornell University Press in the fall. John currently lives with his fiancée in Brooklyn, where he is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at New York University, and he also holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. Visit him on Twitter and Instagram @JohnLinstrom, at his website at johnlinstrom.com, and on Facebook.

“On the President’s Announcement of Our Hashtag” was previously publish by This Week in Poetry.

Photo credit: Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash.