“Up & Down Or Cutting Across Chess Boards Which Aren’t Best Metaphors, Hear Songs Of Our Earth While You Can” and “End As Beginning As…?”

“Up & Down Or Cutting Across Chess Boards Which Aren’t Best Metaphors, Hear Songs Of Our Earth While You Can” and “End As Beginning As…?”

Gerard Sarnat

“Up & Down Or Cutting Across Chess Boards Which Aren’t Best Metaphors, Hear Songs Of Our Earth While You Can” and “End As Beginning As…?”

Up & Down
Or Cutting
Across Chess
Boards Which Aren’t Best Metaphors, Hear Songs Of Our Earth While You Can.

Just as Technology

has shifted from

being a vertical —

organizationally

in a stack above or

below other usual

equal silos such as

HR, Finance, Ops,

Sales & Marketing

all reporting up

most likely to big

picture CEOs —

to worming into a more powerful horizontal fundamental throughout entire enterprises,

so has Climate

Change moved

out of its recent

confined box

now to clearly

affect almost

anything that we

have named as

highest priorities*

ranging from

Jobs/ Economy,

to Health Care,

to Education

to Terrorism, SSI, Inequality, Immigration so has become a second controlling horizontal.

Food-system

collapse, sea

level rise, sick

our good Earth

ruined, we few

drop in on Mars

then a couple of

Jovian moons

before set out

to roam stellar

prairies trapped in

dead-end tin cans:

Flailing memory, once stars of our past now at half-glimmer soon fade to total darkness.

*State of the Union 2019: How Americans see major national issues
Pew Research Center

End As Beginning As...?

99.9999% lifeforms

died today*.

75% known species

went extinct.

If you looked up

a “star’”s

luminosity grew

very large.

The previous lush

warm planet

just teeming with

organisms —

an asteroid plunged

Earth from

Cretaceous Period

into dark

deep freeze Palogene.

It was as if

we took a billion

Hiroshima

bombs’ lone bullet:

peaks rose

much higher than

Mt. Everest.

Temperatures

higher

than our sun’s.

Wildfires

consumed 70%

of forests,

set subcontinent

India ablaze.

Oceans emptied.

Ash covered

all – only ferns

thrived.

But vagabond

debris sown

into space had

microbes

which make it

promising

2 Jupiter moons

contain life.

And 66 million

years pass

bark beetle bits,

paddlefish

conifers blossom

as dinosaurs

give way to

previously trivial

mammals which’s

what allowed

us a short time to

thrive ‘til now?

*thanks to Douglas
Preston’s The Day
the Dinosaurs Died, New
Yorker, 8 April 2019

About the Author

Gerard Sarnat

Late-phase often graphic poet arrived in seventh decade, aphorist, humorist or sometimes meanderist; Gerard Sarnat’s a multiple Pushcart/Best of Net Award nominee. Activism Through Poetry: How Gerard Sarnat Uses Verse as a Form of Protest is a 2025 retrospective. His work’s been widely published; including four collections; by Rattle, London Arts-Based Research Centre, Israel Association of Writers in English, The Nature of Our Times/Poets For Science, Gravity of the Thing, Brooklyn Review, Tokyo Poetry Journal, Gargoyle, New Delta Review, Buddhist Review, New York Times, Oberlin, St. John’s University, Northwestern, Yale, Pomona, Harvard, Missouri Baptist, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Columbia, Grinnell, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Brown, North Dakota, McMaster, Maine, British Columbia/Toronto/Chicago, Virginia and Alabama university presses. He’s a Harvard Medical School-trained physician, Stanford professor, healthcare CEO. Currently, he’s devoting energy and resources to dealing with climate justice, serving on Climate Action Now’s board. Sarnat’s belonged to the longest-running U.S. Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue Group. Gerry’s been married since 1969 and has three kids, six grandsons — and looks forward to future granddaughters.