Anthropocene

By | 1 May 2020

While there are other words I’d prefer
to break down into the sum 
of their syllabic parts,
contraband, for example, or corollary,
for now this catch-cry for the age 
will do, and so I begin, and when 
I have taken each sound apart 
to find definitions
of climate, geology, human intervention 
and anything else within
its musical componentry,
I return, not to another name
for illicit goods, but to Licmetis,
white relative of the sulphur-
crested cockatoo,
once a full-time denizen
of the interior, now a resident
in rowdy flocks that number
many thousands, driven
to the margins, to the coast,
away from dying crops
and a killing absence of water,
I refer to the Corella,
the natural extension
of a word that means
being resultant from something else,
and how corollary
also applies to corally,
given a red tide of coral spawn
on a reef, which in turn
brings four syllables
from where they’ve been
hiding in plain sight
in the Anthropocene.

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