~
Meltdown
We first met standing out
in the New York cold
unable to buy tickets
to see Neil deGrasse Tyson.
We walked through the snow
and you slipped on the ice
and I caught and held you
for a precious moment.
We found a warm coffee house
and talked about astrophysics
and you quipped about Mars as
a living option to a polluted
overheated earth perhaps even
the moon with ice now known
while I demurred wanting to
stay on our pale blue dot,
and it snowed that night
when we met some time ago.
Now years later into the
Anthropocene era I think
of you on this day when
the North and South poles
melted down to ice cubes.
I will drop the first cube
into my last drink and
save the other to share
with you if you would
join me to commemorate
their final meltdown
in a martini glass,
while sitting alone
looking at the ice as
the shape of water and
now gone from the poles.
I look up and you appear
from out of summer heat
wearing a teddy coat
and long Hermes scarf
and you sit close with me
to wait at Godot’s Bar
for the return of winter
when we know all
will be well once again
when winter kept us warm and
covered earth in remembered snow,
that night when we met
some time ago.
~
Jim Hanson is a retired Senior Researcher at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He is a sociologist and lay-ordinate Zen Buddhist. He is a member of the St. Louis Poetry Center and lives in the St. Louis area. His chapbook was published by Flutter Press in October 2019 and titled Anthropic Musings: Poems on Human Survival in the Coming Extinction. Recent single poems have appeared in Dissident Voice, I am not a silent poet, International Journal of Fear Studies, Nebo, Nightingale and Sparrow, New Verse News, Otolith, Poetry24, River Poets Journal, Sacred Journey, Writers Resist.