Stephen Cole (Climate Change, Eco-activism, Whisperings of Social Justice)

Stephen Cole was born in Los Angeles California near the end of the Second World War. He was raised in the Hill Country of Northeast Mississippi and in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. He currently lives in Kansas City, Kansas, USA. He was a statistician by profession, and a senior executive in marketing statistics for a major corporation which shall remain nameless, albeit his true passion has always been philosophy and poetry and in trying to establish a connection in between.

 

The capital investments

The ancient pig blood
And the swine song liturgy,
Someone’s heresy,
Swilling the gut shellfish
—The kosher ones—as
The coyote dances away from the harvest
At the Pacific shore—by the collection
Of the birth pools in the shallows,
The Campsites
And stone tools
Teaching on prehistory’s failure
At the end of all ancient schools.

Therefore, we discover
Too late the golden rule
That was too hard for us to take
Without an object lesson
To replenish nothing in us,
Oh vacuous ‘I’
At the bone level
Of flesh on the spool.
And so on to the fire circles
Where religions are justified
To assure our native criminality
By the theft of natures low hanging jewels
For extravagance in Baal’s greed
(False or true).

Hard to find yourself in the river blood
And not think it is mud
Taken from the memory
Of generations of species depletion.
It is the end of nature
Fueled our nations of taking
In the lying conceit
That you not lose.
 Nature will win
As it sweeps bear the landscape
Of fragmented love
Along with your name
With no warning to others
As to why you are destroyed now
When you have forgotten
The rugged way you came.

There is no peasant tradition
No treaty, no rendition
To see you through
 And
The poison seeps through your guilt
And pours out the unconcern
As punishment drips from open sores.

When all the resources are finally tapped out
And cannot be replenished
At your hand,
Retribution comes knocking
And chokes you
On all your penurious doubts.

 

 

Carrion voices on the Tombigbee

According to the unfair argument,
The ‘coffin maker’ is dead.
The river is dead
And we killed the river,—once
And for all, all for one,
A terrible god, to be respected—
Now, a canal playground
For discarded beer cans.

Death came handily
By the rites of biblical dictation
In the murderous dominion
Of privileged eminent domain.
Knowing this played very little
In the evidentiary kennels of dogs bones
You see left over to marvel
On how thorough is the disappearance.

All the gods are boxed up
And go at a price: a
Set of two for ten
At a discount
And though barely worth unwrapping
For a philosophical viewing,
It is said it is never true
And we know that to be true.

This equity transfer in the kudzu
Is impenetrable
And traps the sacred bovine
Where they eat themselves to death
For the advantage of no one.

Sweet williams,
And the Old Man’s Beard
Crowd the waterway
In memory of what was once
The flood of nature
In full consciousness. Now
Given that God
And nature are in cahoots,
We’re going to have to work it out for ourselves.

Now we must learn a new language
To hide the painfully extended events
In the saplings pines
And the dogwoods, looking
For the preferred words
In today’s execution of tomorrow.

Can it possibly be this sad
When it is dead and barren
So no one hears the death laugh
In the revenge of weather?

 Yes

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Setu, July 2023 :: Climate Change, Eco-activism, Whisperings of Social Justice