Pollen transmits nature’s news––falling & swirling,
fractal-like, soaked in roadside puddles,
gullying down grass-flattened ditches,
stealing, up-tree, into female pinecones. Million-fold,
the sculpted grains accumulate––a quiet sustenance
atop mute thickets. The oldest news in the world
broadcasts, chalk-like, with earthy undertones, a new spring.
Microphones transmit humans’ news––a runaway child,
a collapsed building, a break-in, a city on fire.
Mostly, musings on machines & calamity.
A million years from now: a tinny archaeologist uncovers
& dates the site of cattail microphones to a renamed epoch,
the Anthropocene. The archaeologist records how, back then,
microscopic baubles swept from beech trees & pines into peat bogs & lake beds;
how vocalizations articulated from tongued mouths into tiny transmitters;
how a few of the bone & blood beings, it is said, screamed words
––digitized & windborne––
with urgent overtones, letting it be known to whoever would listen:
eruption, climate change, machine age, extinction.
— by Lisa Merschel
