Speaking Across The Ages:

For My Great-grandchildren In the Year 2100

This is for you, unborn as yet,
I, of course, will be dead.
It’s midnight in the mountains.
The moon is full and high in a clear sky.
Something goes ‘squib’ in a bush nearby every half a minute.
It’s a sound I’ve never heard before.
The sky is laced with high altitude contrails.
It’s April.
It should be too cold
to stand outside on the 2nd floor deck in just my pajamas, but
it’s not.
I apologize.
I don’t know what to say to you.
I was not a bad man, nor was I a good one.
In total, I probably did as much harm as good.
When your mother’s Zhen Zhou-Mou, Chi-hsuan, and I
came up this evening to the family’s country house,
the driveway was muddy, wet, and rutted.
There should have been snow on the ground,
instead, there was just moonlight dancing on the power lines,
exposing bare earth.
Tomorrow it will rain.
Warm spring waters,
rather than cold snowmelt,
will run through streams and rivers
to the ocean that’s absorbed 80% of the heat added to the climate.
Last winter I went to the Bahamas
on a trip that your Zhen Zhou-Mou, Irene, organized.
We took a side-trip to an outer island where I snorkeled in the surf
though I was still nauseous from seasickness and heat.
I saw anemones, fish the colors of poster paint, even a sea turtle,
playing in the reef.
The coral was still alive.