Rebecca Starks
Poetry
Rebecca Starks has poems and short fiction appearing in Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Stonecoast Review, Ocean State Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Slice, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of Rattle’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor, and her manuscript is a finalist for the 2018 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. A freelance editor and teacher living in Vermont, she is a director of the Burlington Writers Workshop and a co-founder of Mud Season Review.
The More Things Change
All the news is tree buds in December
after a warm spell, the ground’s sodden give
a springboard for global speculation:
everything cellular deems it’s spring—
as if for longer than living memory
leaves haven’t prepared against their brittle fall
the bulletin of their bursting forth again.
All the news is bird song in February,
as if it didn’t break the ice each year,
the cardinal’s Do what you know, you don’t know—
as if no one up north had taken note
of how the chits resume when the light fans out
even as night’s wings dip twenty below
and the lake stiffens under the air’s touch.
I’d like to respond to the next-to-last caller:
look how, even taking the longest view
you want it immediate, chafe at delay.
You want to prove what we fail to imagine.
The revolution will begin with pruning,
pruning anticipating memory—
We’ll have to leave that thought. We’re out of time.
The news, again, the eye-on-the-sky forecast,
variable clouds and sun, winds out of—
No, not out of time; helplessly in it. Look how
we, too, conform to the revolving rhythm,
some lignifying, others broadcasting
beyond the air we breathe, as if rootless
eternity were our territory.
“
When I listened to people call in on a local radio program, it struck me that even those concerned about climate change had lost touch with the natural world and seemed impatient for the disaster to be here, to be something we can perceive now with our senses. Maybe our best hope is to remember our way back into cyclical nature. As I wrote I was thinking of a line by Larry Levis: Every revolution ends, or it begins, in memory.
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