As Humans Screw Up Yet Again, Don’t You Just Wish Mother Gaia Would Step In?
1September 23, 2022 by The Citron Review
by Patience Mackarness
For James Lovelock (1919-2022), who proposed the Gaia Theory
When the glacier shrank, its people woke from their long sleep, gliding from clefts and crevasses as vaporous wisps.
They saw grey naked rock where the ice had retreated halfway up the valley. They saw blue-white torrents emerging from the glacier’s belly, hurtling debris-laden towards the sea.
They sighed, and began to dance.
They summoned fresh cold from compacted Antarctic snows, from polar sea-ice, from the Moon’s occluded face. Moving in complex formation, they twirled snowflake-crystals, wove tapestries of hoarfrost, braided garlands of rime.
The glacier grew, crystal by crystal, slow as the tail of a maimed lizard.
Patience Mackarness lives and writes in rural Brittany, France. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published by Lunch Ticket, JMWW, Lost Balloon, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Every Day Fiction, and elsewhere. Lately, she’s found herself writing several anxious eco-fables.
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