Army

Maybe it will take an eight-billion-strong
snowman army to demonstrate extinction to us,
setting them up one by one.

Maybe we first need to see each iced-water delegate
shrink, helpless, as the mercury rises,
before our complicity and complacency give up the fight

for the same gammy leg. But then with the risk of new pariahs:
people for whom the snow figure was already a meltwater puddle
when that of others was still a lump: the squeaky-new ‘elite’.

Things could then get grim, knowing us
since ’45 – ’39: I’m saying it back to front as if everything then
counts backwards, back to once long ago and far away a species
that could still suspect itself of bare beauty.

Sometimes, the unbridled nostalgia for that time can be heard
in the almost childlike sounds of the bean geese.
They say you shouldn’t feed them, but when you don’t
satisfy the craving for primeval innocence, you –

Oh, those birds, so drab and samey
as if made on a conveyor belt by all the earlier people

who, so they would honk so hauntingly, would fill them upwith ever-more seldom snow.

Ruth Lasters