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.
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