The Ecphorizer

Ignorance in Progress
Brian Coyne

Issue #59 (October 1986)



I wished that they would stop as I lay in the grass;
some parts glaucous green, others parched, gossamer,
lifeless.
I thought of the time this might all be destroyed,
looking at the border between cyan pasture and dark city.
The distance had shortened since I had seen it last,
as a receding gray-hairline does before baldness occurs.
Perhaps the world will too become a glabrous globe,
lacking its own colorful topping of yellows, reds, and
greens.
What, then, has this cold world to show? Rusted earth?
This black process is only beginning yet it will continue,
the small dominoes of progress, nudging the larger and
larger dominoes, a chain reaction, impossible to stop.
The scientists, calculating, hypothesizing the age of the earth,
now aid in the construction of more efficient tools with
which to destroy the emerald planet in less time
than it took to conceive it.
Now this process speeds at a rate doubling in fewer and fewer
years. I will enjoy these jade specimens of botany that
so diligently support human life for as long as they
can support their own.
 


Poet BRIAN COYNE is a new member of Greater Los Angeles Area Mensa and a student at John Burroughs High School in Burbank.

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