AS THE WORLD POPULATION SURPASSES 8 BILLION, I PURPOSELY MISREMEMBER A LINE FROM ANNE CARSON’S SAPPHO AND HEAR IN ITS UTTERANCE THE SONG OF THE HUMPBACK WHALE
More of us than ever before walk
the Earth at once. All over the globe more
men and women fall in and out of love,
and open windows frame more rain-facing
faces than ever before in the history of
storms. There are more children learning the sad
math of growing up than ever before,
more dead goldfishes flushed down toilets, more
middle schoolers unlearning the bass
guitar, string by string. There are more old men
eating canned peaches beneath olive trees,
more family trees scrawled by red crayon
in the script and meter of ancient seas.
Strikingly beautiful gray-haired women
bow over raised beds of roses with much
more frequency than in any other
era. There are more mothers and more kisses,
more eyelashes fluttering mascara
butterflies, more desires, more hands both slapped
and held, more kids praying beneath covers
in the middle of the night. There’s more tears
by millions of liters, much more despair,
and surprisingly much more stupid hope
to cling to, to flip-kick off the wall of—
more smudged pencil x-es on love letters,
more lipstick traces on coffee cups, more
hips, thighs, breasts, sighs, biceps, collarbones, aches
in the groin, in the knuckles, in the beat
of breeze against branch, of throat against verb,
more to fear, to love, to praise, to sing with—
to thread into the horizon’s pink hem,
to pull from pine needle and leaf alike
this hymn of the planet spinning into us.
—from Poets Respond
November 20, 2022
__________
Dante Di Stefano: “I wrote this after reading an article about the world population surpassing 8 billion.”
