Use of this NASA image, copied from https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/phytoplankton-bloom-near-norway-13599/, does not mean that NASA endorses this poem. Image listed as courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC.
Natural Consequences 101:
a remedial course for authoritarians
Volcanoes and earthquakes get all the attention. Granted, they specialize in spectacle
like wintry snowshoe hare: streaks of white on white, leaping clear between trees, free to run
until some patient lynx or loping, frost-tipped wolverine crosses the ridge, carrying a hunger
hot as a deep-sea vent in a freezing forest of ocean-floor rock.
Rust-red stained snow is spectacle too, but there’s another way to tell this story. Forest,
transformational master of both loss and ellipsis, shows it in xylem, branch, and mycelial
synapse, shaping a warning to the authority who shuns humility: When scales tip under a heavy
hand, gravity claims what spills.
Back away, far enough to lose sight of blood-spattered snow. One move still leads to the next but
now as ripples in exponential webs like a vast curtaining dance, where tectonic shifts elicit
aurora-green plumes of multiplying plankton, a movement so tiny it impacts at scale.
To sum up, if every force is met by an equal and opposite force, then in time, each spectacle
meets what it incites—the sinewy move no hare sees coming.
For more information about how tectonic shifts and deep sea vents lead to phytoplankton blooms (one of the inspirations for this poem), click the following link:
Thank you, as always, Tricia.
We are all choking on our outrage & tears.