Who Knows
We know disaster is coming.
The scientists have something
big in store for us—a burning,
an ice age, a rumbling-tumbling.
It will all come down upon us,
they say (or not, who knows.)
We can put aside our pride, and work
at loving the people with us.
Tear down the walls and make paths
toward inclusion, fellowship,
and we might make it through
in a basement shelter with friends.
(Or not), or join a tribe and fight
to win another underpass.
Go all out Mad-Max, live savagely.
Put out all the lights one last time,
learn to forage until nuclear
winter ices our bones,
or the greenhouse gases melt
our resolve, if not our flesh.
At some point we’re all bound
to be the outhouse flies that pester
their betters in the moment of duty.
The earth may shuck us all off
her back, and we perish with those
words: “How dare you?!”*
as our last thought.
And whatever is left will be a ruin
to be renamed by others
who come after us (or not).
* excerpt from a Greta Thunberg speech
Same Song, Second Verse
The world under siege is a startling
dream, in which all her children
are falsified, discredited, eliminated,
erased. The daughters made foul,
the sons shot down. The gutted earth
takes solace in the blue jays and the crow,
and her tears that embody hope, fall
to the ground to become trees.
Windblown, lightning-struck sons
on whom she will keep a tighter hold.
She will keep them ready for the next
forefather of her end times, who stays
longer in the garden, his counterpart
attempting to tempt him into another
roll in the hay.
According to Need
A bee, a squirrel,
a woman of the world,
confer on a windowsill
beneath an apple tree.
Each takes something
from the tree to be theirs.
The squirrel bites at the
hard green windfalls.
The woman remembers
the day she planted the tree
and the man who dug
the hole for the sapling’s
root ball. He himself is now
a root ball, curled some-
where beneath a spruce.
She thinks how hard for
her the past is to bear.
It is the bee who thinks
of the future, having
already scrambled over
the apple blossoms weeks
ago, before they turned fruit,
gathering nectar, pollen,
for honey, an act of hope.
Will Reger has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He has published two books of poetry, Petroglyphs (2019) and Kaleidoscope (2020). He has served as the inaugural poet laureate for the city of Urbana, Illinois 2019-2020. For the last decade he has been active in promoting poetry in his community. When he is not focused on poems, he watches water flow, listens carefully to what crows are saying, and plays world flutes, especially the nan xiao from southern China (similar to the shakuhachi from Japan).
We know disaster is coming.
The scientists have something
big in store for us—a burning,
an ice age, a rumbling-tumbling.
It will all come down upon us,
they say (or not, who knows.)
We can put aside our pride, and work
at loving the people with us.
Tear down the walls and make paths
toward inclusion, fellowship,
and we might make it through
in a basement shelter with friends.
(Or not), or join a tribe and fight
to win another underpass.
Go all out Mad-Max, live savagely.
Put out all the lights one last time,
learn to forage until nuclear
winter ices our bones,
or the greenhouse gases melt
our resolve, if not our flesh.
At some point we’re all bound
to be the outhouse flies that pester
their betters in the moment of duty.
The earth may shuck us all off
her back, and we perish with those
words: “How dare you?!”*
as our last thought.
And whatever is left will be a ruin
to be renamed by others
who come after us (or not).
* excerpt from a Greta Thunberg speech
Same Song, Second Verse
The world under siege is a startling
dream, in which all her children
are falsified, discredited, eliminated,
erased. The daughters made foul,
the sons shot down. The gutted earth
takes solace in the blue jays and the crow,
and her tears that embody hope, fall
to the ground to become trees.
Windblown, lightning-struck sons
on whom she will keep a tighter hold.
She will keep them ready for the next
forefather of her end times, who stays
longer in the garden, his counterpart
attempting to tempt him into another
roll in the hay.
According to Need
A bee, a squirrel,
a woman of the world,
confer on a windowsill
beneath an apple tree.
Each takes something
from the tree to be theirs.
The squirrel bites at the
hard green windfalls.
The woman remembers
the day she planted the tree
and the man who dug
the hole for the sapling’s
root ball. He himself is now
a root ball, curled some-
where beneath a spruce.
She thinks how hard for
her the past is to bear.
It is the bee who thinks
of the future, having
already scrambled over
the apple blossoms weeks
ago, before they turned fruit,
gathering nectar, pollen,
for honey, an act of hope.
Will Reger has a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He has published two books of poetry, Petroglyphs (2019) and Kaleidoscope (2020). He has served as the inaugural poet laureate for the city of Urbana, Illinois 2019-2020. For the last decade he has been active in promoting poetry in his community. When he is not focused on poems, he watches water flow, listens carefully to what crows are saying, and plays world flutes, especially the nan xiao from southern China (similar to the shakuhachi from Japan).