Martha Silano

When my father whistled it meant come home,

come home to the porch with the red-peeling paint,
to a man who knew our planet had lost nearly all 
its species five times before, knew

there were things much worse than hundreds of gigatons 
of CO2 releasing into the air, things like the Great 
Dying, which left our planet treeless

for 10 million years, knew that in the Eocene
the Arctic was a steamy swamp teeming 
with giant tortoises and flying lemurs,

the ocean a tepid 76 degrees, that soon enough our world
would replicate that time, carbon’s non-human-induced
spike collapsing the West Antarctic Ice Shelf,

melting all of Greenland, drowning Florida, the Nile Delta, Bangladesh.
Knew it didn’t matter how much coal and oil we burned,
that between 100,000 and 400,000 years from now

the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty would be buried under ice. 
When my dad whistled, he meant it: come home,
but dad, but dad we have a choice:

we can burn it all and go extinct or harness the sun and wind,
so you and your kind can keep asking what day it is,
mispronounce Tuesday as Toozdee, complain

about the price of cauliflower, run your torsion machines,
twist your polymers, dip hotdogs into liquid nitrogen, throw
them at a wall so they shatter

for school children who need to laugh before they can learn.
Oh, dad. I want a planet that isn’t 95 degrees and rising, 
want it to be habitable not only for lizards and birds

but the ones who kiteboard and windsurf, who lie in hammocks and read, 
a place where a father can raise two pinkies to his lips, release a whistle
that says the evening’s over—it’s time to come home. 

 

Martha Silano is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Gravity Assist, and is co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for your Writing Practice. Martha’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The Best American Poetry series, and elsewhere. She teaches at Bellevue College and Hugo House in Seattle, WA.

 
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