“Climate” by Baron Wormser

This poem is part of CavanKerry’s series for National Poetry Month.  Every day in April, we post a poem from our community of writers.

Climate
by Baron Wormser

Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice
And polar bears with no place to go.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life;
Downstairs her mother weeps. The words wife,
Unfair, too long, elongate and explode.

Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice.
Her father tries to soothe this endless strife.
He talks like that, full of what he calls woe.

She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life
Where no beautiful animals entice
Little girls to live in homes of snow.
Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice.

Igloos melt, mothers mutter, knife
The empty kitchen air, pace to and fro.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life.

What’s been done is done not so much in spite
As fear—love marooned on a floe.
Elyse, aged nine, worries about the ice.
She lies in bed, alert to her fraught life.

Baron Wormser is the author/co-author of fourteen books and a poetry chapbook.  Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2006 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. The founding director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, he teaches in the Fairfield University MFA Program and at his home in Montpelier, Vermont.