They’ll say the world has never been this critically wrecked— It’s hit a wall, it’s hit the shoals and splintered into parts. They fear the globe’s a wooden boat we can’t protect From sunlight, in whose oceanic orbit it’s been decked With space-trash tossed by power-hungry lonely-hearts. We sense the world has never been this critically wrecked As if the captain’s cosmic course, like Ahab’s, went unchecked Careening through Andromeda and off the charts And now the globe’s a wooden boat we can’t protect From any myth: a bark on violent seas without a Jonah to suspect Except ourselves. Well, not all ourselves. Evil’s a la carte. The world has never been this critically wrecked; Ask any generation trying madly to collect The shattered constitution of the hull; it’s the ignorance that smarts And makes the globe a wooden boat we can’t protect. If violence starts in sorrow and greed makes leaders derelict And extra-more unmoored, can we restart this ark from start Because really now our world has never been so critically wrecked. The globe’s a wooden boat we can’t protect.
Jessica Greenbaum’s (she/her) most recent collection, Spilled and Gone, was chosen by the Boston Globe as a Best Book, and her previous one, The Two Yvonnes was named a Best Book by Library Journal . Poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, Poetry London, Best American Poetry, 2024 and Pushcart Prize, 2024. She is the co-editor of Treelines: 21st Century American Poems, and Mishkan HaSeder, the first ever poetry Haggadah. A recipient of awards from the NEA and the Poetry Society of America, she teaches inside and outside academia and, as a social worker, with communities who have experienced trauma. https://poemsincommunity.org/
