Who Pays?

Your drear idea we needn’t move
on climate change right now from
where we are to where we need to
be within a word is compromised –
WHY?

Who cares? So be absurd and stay
just as you are is one reply – learn
and survive the rising tide or drown
or die by other mulish means

Be secure that you will die, of that
no sinecure derives unless inured to
fêted buoyancy, as such, which time’s
mortality unnerves to beat

And what a hollow win we’d have
to say – a grand chimera dangled
uselessly in vacant space which
melting ice will soon disgrace

It isn’t ‘WHY’ you need embrace
but HOW we’ll make the grade that
grooms controversy; success per se
was not and never guaranteed

‘WHEN’ to do it still concludes that
NOW is rather late and will not gel
without debate on those who’ll lose
the most and who will have to pay

Deny the rate of change, contemplate
your navels free, – WE’LL have to pay,
just as our children’s children’s
children will, and that’s assuredly
© 30 March 2011, I. D. Carswell