John Popielaski
Eighty-Sixed
Disasters like the burning Amazon
are visible from space, no magnification
necessary, if you have the wherewithal
to launch yourself and orbit, gazing out
the window, one hand cradling a cheek
and portion of your mandible in mellow awe
as you observe the smoke whose drift
is imperceptible and feel a twinge
because you know your planet had it all.
From space, unmagnified, the skeletal boy
in Gaza, dead now anyway, is nothing
to your naked eye, but you can see
the imprint of destruction and determine
as your breath condenses on the outer reaches
of your palm if it is worth it to be this
detached when there is so much down there
aching for another voice, another hand.
In 1966 the ultimate founder
of the Whole Earth Catalog was tripping
on a roof in San Francisco and believed
if NASA loosened up and let us see
the satellite photo of the whole Earth
it would alter human consciousness.
How could it not?
How could it not change for the better
our relationship to Earth and to each being
trying gamely not to die?
But if that change is true, if it occurred,
I’d hate to think where we would be today
without the image on the cover of the Catalog
that first day of September, 1968.
Inside, the Purpose’s first sentence read,
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
On Christmas Eve that year, Apollo 8
was orbiting the moon. Bill Anders snapped
the famous Earthrise photograph in color
and believed, as Stewart Brand had,
that the image of our Earth out there alone
and marbled white and blue was something
capable of turning the foreseeable disaster
into something closer to the way it was
before the demarcations and the falls.
Bill Anders, in an interview on the 50th
anniversary of the photograph,
said it’s really too bad we’re still shooting
at each other on this tiny little place
that we call home. I wished
I could have asked him if he thought we are
as gods and, if so, if he thought we are
about as good at it as we would ever get.
He did say somewhere, I discovered later,
that from his perspective God gave us the stage
for our performance. How the play turns out
is up to us, which sounds like something God would say
before the waters or the horsemen come,
like something someone who has read Macbeth
behind a bar he’s tended for too long might say
before he wipes his hands and turns the light out
on the one place that for all these years would have us
and that by some miracle took this long
to conclude our kind is welcome here no more.