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Today on Sunday Poetry we have a very special post by Terese Mason Pierre from the upcoming Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis anthology. And be sure to sign up for the Sunday Poetry Newsletter so you never miss a post!

We Will Tell Them of Our Dominion

First, we will tell them of our dominion

We will tell them of the web peeling back

in the heavens, the sun's maw radiating

We will tell them we can see the air

We will tell them green turned brown and grey

We will tell them green covered the earth

We will tell them of plastic islands

We will tell them of sands too hot to inhabit,

We will tell them of where people

cannot hold their breath forever

We will tell them of undulating obituaries

We will tell them of backroom deals, of slow-moving cogs

We will tell them of childhood depression

We will tell them of corporate footprints,

handprints, fingers in pies, stained red

We will tell them of mass delusion

We will tell them of moral misbehavior

We will tell them of fears for marble over feather and fur

We will tell them about the non-identity problem

We will tell them of the powerful two-faced 

We will tell them why the scientists cried

We will tell them why the philosophers cried

We will tell them why the parents cried

We will tell them of carbon dioxide

shouts, of splintered protests

We will tell them of tear gas, of turned heads

We will tell them of laws broken

We will tell them of backs broken

We will tell them of turning, turning

Later, we will tell them the oil barons are dead

We will tell them guardians fought back

We will tell them a panacea was birthed from the Amazon ash

We will tell them blood is not translucent, but still pumping

We will tell them the ocean is still loud

We will tell them we relocated the sacred

We will tell them we refined our brains

We will tell them the sun is everything

We will tell them we were sorry

We will tell them we know why the sky is blue.

*

I tend to start my poems with a word, a phrase, or an image. I started this poem with the word 'dominion.' I'd only heard it in Biblical contexts, of God giving man dominion over the earth and all its creatures. Then I started to think about how humans have shaped the earth, it's creatures, it's resources, the course of its potential, and this poem manifested.

I feel that it carried more weight the more words I added. I don't normally use repetition in my poetry, but I liked the strength here.

I originally wanted the poem to be negative, to continue the tone of the first four stanzas. Then I thought about the reason why I was writing the poem in the first place - for a climate change event - and I knew I had to make it positive in the end. I tried to include within the poem some sense of a transformation. But I don't write about how it happens - just a transition word, "later."

I hope there will be a time where we can speak about past environmental harms after the fact, where we will have already made the change

Terese Mason Pierre is a writer and editor. Her work has appeared in The Puritan, Quill and Quire, and Strange Horizons, among others. She is currently the Senior Poetry Editor of Augur Magazine, a Canadian speculative literature journal. Terese has also previously volunteered with Shab-e She’r poetry reading series, and facilitated creative writing workshops. Terese lives and works in Toronto.