Metamorphosis

Poem by Anne C. Gruner

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I can pinpoint the inciting incident
that launched my transmutation—
like an egg cracked open
and a different species hopping out.

My hatchery was Kim Stanley Robinson's
New York 2140, which I read
during the pandemic.

As a lover of sci-fi, I savored his vision
of a permanently inundated Manhattan,
renamed SuperVenice, and its
MetLife Tower used for parking boats.

I'd read Robinson's Mars trilogy
and knew he was a "liberal," I being  
a lifelong conservative Republican, duly
climate indifferent and brain-washed
by Senator Inhofe's The Greatest Hoax.
Still, I had some disquiet, believing
good sci-fi can foreshadow the future.

Suddenly, I was immersed in David Wallace-Wells'
The Uninhabitable Earth, which led to
over a dozen other books. The next I knew,
I awoke one night and started writing a poem,
The Earth Cries, now renamed With a Whimper.
Before that, I'd never written a poem, ever.

Twelve published poems later, mostly
"eco poems," including one that won a prize,
I ponder what to call my debut collection
of verse about the Anthropocene—a new word
in my vocabulary, along with anapest. 

Just this morning I challenged a neighbor
who was about to chop down a mature oak tree—
in his own yard. What was I thinking?

I'm like an aging Greta Thunberg.
Three years ago it was more probable
that I'd wake up as a giant beetle.

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Anne C. Gruner is an accomplished poet whose works have been featured in various esteemed literary publications, including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Plum Tree Tavern, Humans of the World, Jalmurra, Written Tales, Spillwords, and Old Mountain Press anthologies. Her forthcoming work will be published in The Bamboo Hut.