I Denali

                       I Denali

I Denali am majestic mountains and valleys,

glaciers of frozen fresh water, forest, tundra, and permafrost –

grizzly bear, caribou, wolf, moose, Dalls sheep, vole, and tiny mouse.

I live now near polar North, my Earth’s work

to radiate Sun’s heat to frigid outer space

and balance out the sun flux that beats at our equator.

I now sustain our temperature for fertile growth.

My life is billions of earth sun circuit years.

I have drifted over the surface of our Earth

colliding with and splitting apart from continents

My second is the hundred thousand earth sun circuit years

of glaciation-warming cycles. I knew the wooly mammoth,

giant beaver, giant sloth, gone extinct in my second of time.

My minute is the million year volcanisms; their greenhouse warming.

All ice melted then and oceans rose five hundred feet

from glacial Earth to ice-free Earth.

My day is tens of millions of sun circuits.

A day ago my mountains were under ocean

nursery and graveyard for fish and sea fans.

My mountains rose and rise now an inch a sun circuit.

My year is billions of sun circuits

All ancestral life of earth born and dying repeatedly

buried in ocean sediments, earth graves covered by

weathering of mountain, blown desert rock dust.

Your honorable Ancestors cleansed Earth’s sky of too much CO2

to give you breath of oxygen by their life and death and burial.

My year ago my Athabascan tribe called me Tallest One, Denali.

My second ago I saw your wooden sailing ships

reach my continent to conquer it with your Ancestor burning culture.

You lethargically ride to me in the stink of your domed rail cars and busses

to gape in weak ignorant awe at my majesty.

Trees lean drunken and dying in my softened earth.

Villages, of those who lived here with me in harmony from last ice age,

are smashed by winter storm unprotected by winter ice

or sink into my softened earth.

You rip off tops of my brother mountains and push the rubble into verdant valleys

to needlessly burn your Ancestors for energy to drive your adolescent entertainments.

I Denali mourn for my older brother Appalachians - despoiled.

We, my brothers and sisters, of Greenland, Andes, Himalayas, Antarctica,

have Wolves you need to know.

Our Wolves rest and feast in artic winter on snowshoe rabbit, vole and mouse,

then cull migrating caribou herds of the weakest young and old for health of herd.

The smoke of your fires burns their eyes and defiles their nostrils.

Our Wolves circle your pitiful burning campfires.

Their fangs gleam white salivating and hungering for your thinning.

See in their glowing red eyes: glaciers melt, sea ice retreats, reflecting less sunlight, 

as my dark earth and sea absorb more from sun

to flood your shore-hugging castles of burnt bone and shell.

See my permafrost of your frozen ancestors rot and decompose

to bubble upwards rejoining the air as greenhouse CO2 and methane.

Eight times these our Wolves have ravaged - driving hubristic life to near extinction.

I Denali cry out to you, you foolish blind deaf:

                                   “Desist! Live in harmony!

Else your grandchildren will starve as deserts expand across Americas, China, Australia, Africa …

Rising sea on low islands and coasts will fill fields with salt

then drown your splashing struggling children.

Rivers will run dry and aquifers pump dry of fresh water.

Thirst, hunger, disease, and murderous warfare over the scraps of your destruction

will savage your desperate migrating herds of refugees.”

© David W Oliver 7/10/09