Lost Cathedrals

The future is a long time ago—preserves,
nature’s trails, unending battlefields, then
your fly line rounding a bend in the river.

There’s wildlife, unimpaired for generations,
and rapids and lakes versus political will
and the future being such a long time ago.

Once Yellowstone hid itself from humans,
and the Badlands’ rosy corona never ebbed;
your fly line could round a bend in the river. 

In hills of bentonite clay, in petrified woods,
some petroglyphs still live yet you have to ask
why the future is such a long time ago. 

Zion. Arches. Isle Royale.
Twenty-nine Palms, California.
Our future is a such long time ago. When next
will your fly line round any bend in a river?

In this version, a coyote

limps through my neighborhood with a look
of I’m very hungry; I have come for your cat—

This morning the song of a lesser goldfinch
half-notes and is even less at the next dawn,

and again the MyShake app signals another
day on which Earth may fall in upon herself.

I tell my daughter I once loved miles of blue
sky but she says she’s tired of that old gambol;

that it’s a fairytale as silly as Snow White &
the seven except she is forced to admit that 

a number of  mothers are birthing children
whose growth resembles that of grumps &

dopes whose legs are strong which, of course,
is no benefit when they swim out into the sea 

trying to capture its plastics, its gut of dead
fish.  In this version, would-be eco-travelers 

have few choices: Arctic glaciers, melting; San
Juan Capistrano cloaked in swallows’ feathers.

In this version, what you’re reading was written
several generations ago in disappearing  i n k

—Lynne Thompson

In our ECO LIT series, Red Canary Magazine dedicates space for established writers and emerging voices to imagine better ways of being.