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I can pinpoint the inciting incident that launched my transmutationā 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 Anthropoceneāa new word in my vocabulary, along with anapest. Just this morning I challenged a neighbor who was about to chop down a mature oak treeā 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.
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.
Powerful