Mourning The Gulf

Mourning
the Gulf —
what do we mourn?

The sea turtles,
the moon jellies,
the phytoplankton we cannot see?

The tarballs cutting our vacations
short, or ending them
before they begin?

The fishermen
staring
at loaded guns?

Sunsets that hover and dip
into rainbow sheens
and brown slicks over our memories?

Do we fear the oily hurricanes
and greasy storms
yet to come? 

Are we grieving
the Gulf, or how our own
experience with it

has now forever changed?
Do we even know what grief is
when it comes to such a thing as this —

for I do not believe the Gulf is grieving
as past extinctions
surge into view.

I do not believe a pelican
mourns as it dies, or that a shrimp
faces death with stoic resignation.

The earth feels nothing today
as it bleeds.  What we feel
is unimportant to the earth

as it turns, as it adapts
to this.  In five hundred years
it will be as if nothing happened here,

except to us if we are still here.
We mourn for that, not for the Gulf,
but for ourselves.  For what we learn

about how small we are, understanding
for the first time again
that when we break the Earth we break only ourselves,

how the planet always heals, cleans itself up,
but never fast enough to save us from what we believe
of our own omnipotence.