It’s 3:23 in the morning

This is the first post in a new blog series. It will contain my notes, musings and observations about changes in my environment and to our environment, and my experience of collapse, which we may very well be experiencing. I’m reminded of the scene in the movie, Ice Age, where the mother dinosaur says to the kid dinosaurs something like, “OK, enough playing extinction games, now. There will be time for that later.”

In this same vein, the poem Hieroglyphic Stairway, by Drew Dellinger, has been haunting me these last 10 years and provides the refrains I hear over and over as I witness climate changes firsthand, and by report. Here it is:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fjc4rmJdA3k%3Fwmode%3Dopaque%26enablejsapi%3D1

Hieroglyphic Stairway

by Drew Dellinger

it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?

as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?

did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?

what did you do
once
you
knew?

I’m riding home on the Colma train
I’ve got the voice of the milky way in my dreams

I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry

I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech

I am the desirous earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars

I am everything already lost

the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the cosmos

I use words to instigate silence

I’m a hieroglyphic stairway
in a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane

a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time

I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea

I’m riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the milky way in my dreams

I am myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods

I’m the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire

it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I can’t sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?

I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech