Poems by Gerard Sarnat

Fiji Water: Spin the Bottle

by Gerard Sarnat

From Canary Fall 2019

Gerry lives in Portola Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula on the eastern slope of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Windy Hill Open Space Preserve is a large part of the town's southwest side, and the north side of the town borders Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve.

Donald Trump just sipped it.
Little Marco botched it.
Obama drank it.
Paris Hilton loves it.
Mary J. Blige won’t sing without it.
How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship
thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?
The company’s mantra, “Every drop is green,” is fake news.
Taking water from the land and sky, putting it into containers made from oil,
and shipping it around the world defies core eco-friendly values.
Plastic bottles kill wildlife.
It costs more to drink bottled water than to put gas in your car.
Pacific islands, including Fiji, could soon be under water.

© Gerard Sarnat

Inundation Incantation

Among the Museum of Things I Wanna Forget but Cannot

by Gerard Sarnat

From Canary Spring 2023

Knee-deep in water, Rebecca and her son -- lucky not to be an orphan now -- worked land dotted with decomposed stalks bent from the force of surging mud. “It’s all rotten,” she said, holding a large pan filled with discolored sludgy corn that she hoped to mill after it dried.

But these new inland oceans seem not unique to those Janeiros in Mozambique* or “elsewhere” since 30 USA states’re predicted to experience floods already pummeling livestock/ harvests of Midwest farmers who can least afford it in the face of current tariffs and low crop prices.

With Great Plains early-melting blizzards, cyclones plus typhoons as well as Dorothy’s usual tornados, folks within the Missouri-Mississippi River basins, where towns fought but failed to save breached levees, admit, “Despite airdropped hay, it’s over for us.”

Roads impassable, bridges swamped essentially puts hardworking Iowa plus Nebraska citizens under house arrest --- except for those few very rich Big Agra businessmen with helicopters to travel around buying out bargain-basement single-family farms.

Bringing global warming back home, the 2017 U.S. Geological Survey report says between 1/3 - 2/3 of Southern California beaches will succumb to sea-level rise by end of this century unless fossil fuel emissions are significantly reined in. To be painfully specific, “Zuma and Redondo [where my wife and I have a beachfront condo], and Del Mar, among many others, could all then disappear. They will likely be “completely eroded (up to existing coastal infrastructure or sea-cliffs)” with neighborhoods swallowed.

With the youngest of five grandchildren just born, last night three generations committed a huge chunk of our assets to seed climate change projects. I am trying to contact a college dorm-mate who lived across the hall: since he is Al Gore, we look forward to getting advice about wise stewardship.