Following the lead of poet Matthew Olzmann, I decided to try my hand at a poem/letter to someone fifty years from now. As I did some calculations, that turns out to be exactly 100 years from the year I graduated from high school. Since it is unlikely I will live to see 2067, I left the return address as: Unknown.
I don’t have permission to republish Olzmann’s poem here, but you can read it by going to Poets.org.
Poem/letter to someone fifty years from now.
We were passed remote controls,
And channel flipped from citizens to
Consumers with religious zeal.
We believed we were supporting neighbors,
Making jobs. We shopped,
Fueling the machine,
First with coal and trees,
Petroleum and gas
Then species, one by one.
A frog from the Amazon.
The polar bears. Baskets of birds.
We turned our headsets to fantasies.
We accumulated,
Made gods of the wealthy,
Worshiping their stockpiles.
It was all so entertaining.
We built and blew things up.
We were promised happy endings.
(c) 2017 sara holbrook
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