Vox Populi
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Philip Terman: The Frackin’ Poem
Scarlet tanagers, thrushes, warblers, hawks,
spotted salamanders, skunk and possum,
all the invisible insects—
.
the native shrubs, the wild flowers,
all the trees cut down, the altered
light patterns, the shifting forest canopy,
.
all giving way for the gravel roads,
the trucks and tankers and dust,
hauling their chemical cocktails:
.
the methanol, the isopropyl alcohol,
the ethylene glycon, the crystalline silica,
and all the other toxins, according
.
to the Halliburton loophole, the industry
refuses to disclose, the toxins that cause
blurry vision, severe stomach cramps,
.
burning noses, swollen tongues, headaches,
hair loss, ear pressure, horses that won’t leave the barn—
smell of sulphur, rotten egg, nail polish,
.
water burning out of faucets—
the heavy axles invading
across our farms, compacting the topsoil,
.
reducing plant growth, increasing
the runoff, the erosion like a fully-loaded
cement mixture hauling itself across a lawn
.
after a heavy rainfall, all the way
to our watersheds: the Ohio, the Susquehanna,
the Delaware, the Erie, the Genesee, the Potomac—
.
not to mention the 86, 000 miles of streams
and rivers, the 161, 445 acres of lakes,
the 403, 924 acres of wetlands—
.
the drilling through aquifers, the potential for leakage,
the uranium, the radioactive radon stored
in that black rock that is almost 400 million years old—
.
that shale that has survived from the Devonian age,
that stone of shelled swimmers, like squids,
of plant-like animals related to starfish called sea lilies,
.
that earth, that earth that once we contaminate,
we can never reclaim, that earth
that when we frack, we frack ourselves.
—
Copyright 2015 Philip Terman
Vox Populi 