the emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change

We have as many homes to inhabit
as books to read, piling up in libraries,
coffee tables, bed stands—more than we
can make time to delight in as we draw
the single breath that is our delicate existence.

We have but one Home, ever-changing,
ever-constant, rock and cloud, dust and
rain—such short lives we live and have
lived, how easy to mistake solidity for
permanence: the place we grew up, settling
in, patched-up, still there to visit one day,
perhaps with a wife and son and dog,
out of curiosity—how much smaller it looks,
how much the neighborhood has changed!
All those memories bound up in one planet,
birthdays and tantrums and bedtime stories,
all we’ve ever known, rooted, right here.

And should that home be razed, replaced,
the avocado tree, older than me by a year,
be ripped out to make way for—does it matter?—
I might shed a tear, O glorious nostalgia,
longing for what once was and will, in my heart,
always be! But there are things that I, little
human, strange mammal, can’t fathom in time:
the ground shakes, mountains materialize,
forests burn to the shaking ground, oceans
rise, salt touches the tongue of farmland
and the mouth recoils, seeks the evaporating
lake and finds not relief but devastation,
what was just there is no more. The foundation
altered, we stand around with our shovels,
hammers, dog-eared books, suddenly aware
of the lies we tell to justify annihilation.