Poems by Jan Steckel
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Bat Cataclysm
by Jan Steckel
From Canary Spring 2010
Jan lives between Peralta Creek and Courtland Creek in the East Creek watershed, between the Hayward Fault and San Francisco Bay.
Amphibians disappear from Panama:
delicate frogs, insides visible
through green glass skin;
clawed toads whose eggs erupt
out of blisters on their backs.
Salamanders dance out of the century.
Bats die en masse in hibernaculae,
huge caverns where they’ve slept
fifty million winters
until now. Today, walk across
layers of dead bats on the cave floor.
Tiny bones crunch like black snow.
Avocados evolved to be gulped
by extinct herbivores huge enough
to swallow the pits whole.
The American pronghorn
races sixty miles per hour
from a predator no longer there.
Nobody on the continent
runs that fast anymore.
The mongoose is closer
to the walrus than the rat.
Who knows how we got
from that to this.
Like the dinosaur-killing meteor,
we’re the bat cataclysm,
the amphibian apocalypse.
We’re the four horsemen
galloping toward a future
that is no longer there.
© Jan Steckel
The New Age
by Jan Steckel
From Canary Summer 2019
Fishermen land sharksicles off Cape Cod.
Frozen iguanas like blighted oranges drop
from Florida trees. Down under,
heat wave boils bats’ brains in flight.
Flying foxes litter the ground like baseballs
at batting practice. A subtle moon watches.
Bayous dry up, forests conflagrate,
floods flash, mud slides from mountains
to ocean. A brown bear frozen mid-roar
paws at nothing, dead on the beach,
washed there from the National Forest
with twisted cars and splintered trees.
The freeway is a river of muck over pieces
of people. Gas fires light the night
from broken pipes. Boil the tap water.
Hoard spices and oil. Grow your own food.
The age of cities is coming to its end.
Previously published in the author’s book, Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018).
© Jan Steckel