Photon to Electron to Motion (Or: For Earth Day)

Endangerment Finding
Robin Beth Schaer

Admit our sun is common, a Milky Way twin
to a hundred million more. Even its end
ordinary, no stellar explosion, it will snap
hydrogen to helium then cool to a dense core.

In the mapped and measured sky, you squint,
still wanting the corona of a bright god,
the unconquered sun that chose us to spin
around. But there are no more tributes of maize

and falcon wings when we can burn the light
left epochs ago. You may ratify the droughts
and downpours, assign blame for melting ice
and rising seas, but I can count more kinds

of hammers than turtles; we need instinct,
not law. The dogs of Pompeii howled for days,
snakes slithered from Helice. In the Gallatin Range,
I watched bears leave the forest. That night,

a fault tore a slice of the mountain down,
sleepers drowned in their beds, soaked
in waves off the lake. Hush. Listen
to the rumble of our internal combustion.

There is more elegance in turning photon
to electron to motion. Let us trade the old sun
for the new one, sustain ourselves, green and wet,
within this delicate spindle of axis and orbit.