Poeta Doctus

A bitter example of how vested interests (William Burroughs named them “the Nova Mob”) pervert reason, choke compassion, and stymie sane responses to global warming played itself out at this year’s Pacific Island Forum. Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, refused to endorse the Tuvalu Declaration proposed by the Smaller Island States group, “which acknowledges a climate change crisis, encourages countries to revise the emissions reductions targets and calls for a rapid phase out of coal use.”

“I am accountable to the Australian people, that’s who I’m accountable for,” Mr Morrison said.

Tuilaepa Sailelethe

Not a year ago, Tuilaepa Sailelethe prime minister of Samoa, delivered a speech in Sydney, Australia, 30 August 2018, wherein he said that “Any leader … who believes that there is no climate change I think he ought to be taken to mental confinement, he is utter[ly] stupid and I say the same thing for any leader here who says there is no climate change.”

By serendipity (if not synchronicity), the year the world was supposed to end (2012), I composed a chance, fourteen-line poem in harmony with Sailelethe’s sentiments. I’m not sure it’s much of a poem per se, unless a linguistic expression that fuses topical pertinence, heart, and complex irony is enough.

“BE IT RESOLVED…”

BE IT RESOLVED that

whereas public officials

who deny the reality

of Anthropogenic Climate Change

and hinder efforts to mitigate

its destructive effects present

a clear and present danger

to themselves and others,

said public officials should be

removed from office forthwith

and placed under a physician’s care

until such time as their suicidal

and/or homicidal and/or ecocidal

tendencies cease to present.