Saving Christmas

You already read about cataclysm
on a regular basis. BBC will
just lay it on you straight:
50 years left for ocean fish,
polar bears don't build dens
anymore. What's the point
building a home if there's
no food to eat in it? But I
want to know what you
yourself, the personal you,
are planning on doing
when they come on the TV
announcing the end of
the world. What if
it's only five years? Five
years left to lie in,
five years to be
possessive and jealous,
five years left to utter
stupid jokes to loved ones
just one too many times,
five years to smell the rain,
five years to wonder if
you're getting it right yet.
Will five years be enough?
How many years does
any of us need to learn
to love the world and
those around us enough
to act to keep it all from ending?
What would motivate us
to keep it from ending anyway?
Would we really that it
kept right on, the wondering,
the longing, the discomfort?
And what could we really
do anyway? How can we
act to save all the things we
pretend to hate but really love,
all the foul relationships,
the dysfunctional families,
the polluted rivers,
the abnormally red sunsets,
the visits to the dentist,
the ways we can love and
hate each other so much
at once, the ways we can
know so much about someone
and still know nothing at all.
What we can do, I'm not sure.
That we must do it, I'm certain.
Really, we'll inherit the burdens
that've always been ours in fact,
the first generation of people
to wake up, as kids, to the substantiated
fear of global annihilation,
to clouds of radiation carried
out over the trade winds,
to the slow disintegration of
the North Pole, home to
Santa Claus and our very reason
for living. Think about it:
there might still be time for us
to go down in history as
the generation who saved Christmas.

(2007)