Sasha West / Ode to fossil fuel and other poems

CASSANDRA

You who came before us: Your generations
could look back, celebrate, mock, superior
in understanding to your ancestors, superior
in your ownership of goods: You dug
the deeper quarry, built higher, stripped more
trees bare, ignored those holier-than-thou,
brake-squealing voices: You killed, ensuring
your next kin’s blood spilled, your arms could
take up arms, more war concords could
be written: You wrapped your mind onto
the world, wrapped being around you, you
were that you were, a burning bush that could not
be consumed, your mind a cloud of locusts moving
across the fields: I was there and am here and am out
where we thin to zero: I am your daughter:
I was waiting for you to make me
a landfill for history: You began to plot
how our blood would spill when you kneeled
before that portable climate.

HOW TO ABANDON SHIP

In the middle of life, I found myself in a dark wood.
Was it church bells or bullets that rang out behind me?
Inside: we ticked my daughter’s height up the edge of the door.
The church bells rang bullets out behind me.
Outside: the floods ticked mud up the side of the door.
A dark wood grew inside me.
In the middle of life, I found myself in a darkened country.
We lined our border in tear gas, guns, and cages.
The data showed us how to evacuate democracy.
The church rang out the hour of lead.
The government called the fleeing an invasion, as if
whiteness were a ship that was sinking.
Did the word aberration inoculate us from the pattern?
I told my husband it was a dream, he said it was the news.
Our country’s wealth was a ship sinking bodies.
In the middle of lies, I foundered in a dark wood.
It was drought not war that drove out the people.
I could feel the old sublime strip the world bare inside me.
The government refused to give the crisis its name.
Like Rumpelstiltskin, the name held all its power.
Fear unfurled like a spray of bullets.
We’d given up using goat’s blood to change our storms, our fate.
Wasn’t it enough to change all our lightbulbs?
The floods ticked down houses, one by one.
The church rang out the hour of lead.
Each year set more precedents for the unprecedented.
My daughter was born in our sinking ship without asking.
In the middle of life, I found myself in a dark wood.
We are the accumulated heat of all people ever.
I crawl my way back to that backwards thought:
Our smallest choices make the weather.

CASSANDRA: RE-VISION

And then I woke. Even my hope had been warped
by those old human lies: singular redemption
self as fulcrum: But other bodies had started
the burning before me: after me other bodies would
cover the last cooling ember: We wanted an easy way
out: decision on high, coordinated war effort: Not how
an ecosystem works: the big idea plundered,
erased: My country had sold me on the future:
Its fiction filled all my thoughts: When the visions
subsided, I found: we: and entered: I joined my daughter’s
keen limbs, my husband’s gentle mind: we put our bodies
into the narrative, our hands in dirt: Beasts got louder or
we heard their speech more delicately: We tended
our imaginations: kept rewriting the doom: removed
the human protagonist: We unchained ourselves
from Prometheus’s stolen fire: Around us, we
learned to remember: protected crops with trees, sank
sun into salt to hold and our homes: Waited for wind,
rain: A plenty: The same hand redirects our gaze from the pain
as from the paradise: The winters were gentle: We brought
people to shelter: stopped our sharp yearnings: cut down
barbed wire: The borders and coasts lapped into
our yards: We wore down objects with our hands’
gratitude: gave: and gave again: What machine or law
could hold usback while we worked: to rush
the world back to gathering.