Summitry
“The Scottish Event Campus (SEC) is a world class venue in the heart of Glasgow.”
—UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021 (COP26 summit) website
Our climate summits should be held
Not at a comfy spa,
But where a crude-oil spill has gelled,
The shorebirds’ coup de gras;
Downwind from coal-fired power plants
With smokestacks belching gas;
On glacier ice, where just a glance
Says, “Bottomless Crevasse”;
Mid desert hills once forest-lined:
Let envoys be unnerved.
Grim prospects concentrate the mind,
As great wits have observed.
In Chinos Veritas
We can pretend in overalls
We’re slimmer than we are
From bread and wine and cheddar balls.
But chinos? Think Babar.
Dan Campion is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press) and a contributor of poetry to many magazines, including Able Muse, Light, Measure, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and Think. Selections of his poems titled The Mirror Test (MadHat Press) and A Playbill for Sunset (Ice Cube Press) will be published in 2022.