News Poetry: Waking Dry

I woke up this morning
with a dry throat
& words of a poem about a dead river
rattling around in the bones of my skull-
word seeds, waiting for some flow to bring them to life.
The river bed that once was burgeoning
now empty
dreaming dreams teeming with water bugs, fish and turtles
a whole community of viable.
Waters cut short by nightmares
by being dammed and damned by human concrete needs & desires,
by industrial age emissions that push weather into mad patterns
& shift ecosystems.
Will we wake in time?
Before forests all burn with the fever of civilization
and headwaters are starved of snowpack?
Will rivers flow
without humans renouncing their civilization that turns life into money,
without humans reweaving themselves into the web of life
before it all unravels?

Photo credit: Andrew Kearns, Creative Commons, Flickr