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| Carla M. Cherry |
I love this poem. The more I read it, the more I love it. It is heartbreaking, scary and beautiful.
Lamentation 212, Verse 718 by Carla M. Cherry
Are you still moving to Texas after you retire, I asked.
“Nope,” my friend replied.
“I’m staying right here in NYC. At most, I’d go upstate. It’s the best place to be. Politically.
The weather isn’t too crazy, we don’t get hit with a lot of storms.”
Three weeks later, on Wednesday, September 1, 2021,
Ida whelmed Northeastern skies, sent rivers surging,
flooded our subway stations and streets, stranded more than 600 cars,
left a sinkhole in Morris Park and drowned eleven of us
in mostly illegal basement apartments.
Friday. My locs freshly done at the salon.
After lunch at Maxwell’s, I walked from 111th and Fifth Avenue
to my BXM7 stop on 120th and Third,
nodding to the hip-hop and salsa music from passing cars,
past congregations on stoops, schools,
La Marqueta and shoppers along 116th,
politely declining and wishing God’s blessings
on two hawkers of $2 Metrocards
as I deposited $60 on mine
with my pretax-earnings-funded Commuter Benefits Mastercard,
failing in Spanish to explain to the woman who stopped me
that the 6 train was not coming.
Shook my head at the single-use plastic bags from bodegas and
plastic containers from fast food joints littering the streets,
and dodged secondhand cigarette smoke.
Hotstepped six feet away from
the stiffened carcass of a gray rat
on East 119th between Second and Third.
I wrote two notes to myself in my cell phone:
one to write to my councilman and the Mayor to demand more funds for the Sanitation Department so that every street is as clean as Park Avenue below 96th,
and the resuscitation of Grow NYC and the Zero Waste Initiative.
The other, to buy bamboo toilet paper and paper towels and Tru Earth laundry strips.
It just can’t be too late for us to slow the Gulf Stream and sea level rise
with laws curtailing corporate carbon emissions.
To restore the marshlands.
Build flood walls and permeable pavement.
Convert empty office buildings into eco-friendly apartments with terraced and rooftop gardens, first for the unhoused and people living in substandard conditions.
Transform those silent lobbies into ground-floor food markets selling locally grown produce
and sustainably produced home goods.
To ride state-of-the-art public transit and bicycles.
Replace our gasoline fueled cars with hybrid vehicles.
Should managed retreat become necessary, my heart
may dissolve like soil in a mudslide
without the sidewalks where I skipped hopscotch and double-dutch.
The honey locust trees and lampposts that were bases for tag,
my thirteenth floor view of Goose Island, gulls skimming the surface of the bay
that shimmers in sunlight and moonlight, and Pelham Bay Park.
My walks across the bridge to the soft sands of Orchard Beach
and views of Long Island Sound on City Island.
How far would I have to go
for Atlantic waves that knock me off my feet
Go here for readings from the Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence, including another poem by Carla M. Cherry.
Go here for details of more poetry by Carla M. Cherry.
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