saving

what succeeds

words fail
though
for good or ill
they
are what we have

I’m not sure what the language
is
for impulse
though I know we act
and maybe later
find
the words

and what do we think but
maybe nothing
or
perhaps
the saving words we
have because
there
are a few

c l couch

photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

(I’m sorry, I rely on words that sometimes have two meanings and I mean both, which can go hard in translation; here I mean “succeeds” as to achieve and also as what follows)

Earth, Victim

It was reported in the ‘70s

That we had enough nukes to

Melt the crust off planet

Earth

And in 2016 campaigning in the USA

An uninformed remark

Was made: Why do we make nukes

If we don’t intend

To use them?

We’ve learned how to recycle

Trash and plastic

We can even scrub the skies

To good—

Saving—

Effect

Against ages of waste and disposal

From age-old stability of the

Earth itself,

Our efforts are nascent

Yet

We have humanity in two minds:

One mind mutters, doesn’t matter; I’ll

Be rich and dead and gone

By then

The other mind considers the catastrophe

And asks what might I do

How might I repair

My tongue, my thought, my profit

So that

There’s an Earth-home

In which to have all good

Meanwhile the

Earth itself

Blows out hurricanes our

Way because

It’s losing breath

And also torrents of rain

Because it

Weeps

Earth bleeds through the crust:

We can rise to help everything that’s wounded

We can fall

The way the planet’s falling

Failing

Now

C L Couch

https://youtu.be/tbnmRghubsQ

TYSON: There are people who have cultural, political, religious economic philosophies that they then invoke when they want to cherry pick one scientific result or another. You can find a scientific paper that says practically anything and the press, which I count you as part of, will sometimes find a single paper and say “Here’s a new truth.” But an emergent scientific truth, for it to become an objective truth, a truth that is true whether or not you believe in it, it requires more than one scientific paper. It requires a whole system of people’s research all leaning in the same direction, all pointing to the same consequences. That’s what we have with climate change as induced by human conduct. This is a known correspondence. If you want to find the 3 percent of the papers or the 1 percent of the papers that conflicted with this and build policy on that, that is simply irresponsible. How else do you establish a scientific truth if not by looking at the consensus of scientific experiments and scientific observations. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, signed into law in 1963–a year when he had important things to be thinking about–he signed into law the National Academy of Sciences. Because he knew that science mattered and should matter in governance.