Global Warming: A Sentence
Dana Sonnenschein
Once upon a time, spring started a day or two earlier each year, and autumn lingered longer,
and the pine bark beetles killed lodgepoles in the valleys, but in time the pines that were left burned
and cones burst, and seeds sprouted in the ash,
and every year in the mountains cold killed beetle eggs in the whitebark pines, and the cones opened,
and red squirrels buried the nuts,
and the bears licked up this tribute among roots and wintered beneath snow and gave birth to cubs,
and in the spring, they clawed up the meadows in their demesne to get at wildflower corms
and the first green beside rivers, and it was good,
and then one year summer lasted long enough for beetle eggs to hatch higher on the hillsides,
and pine needles fell in drifts,
and there were no nuts to be squirreled away
and no veins of pale gold when the bears cleaved the earth,
and the next year the whitebarks stood like ghosts along the continental divide,
and the grizzlies woke when the snow melted, and they had no young, and their eyes were muddy;
they were hungry, and all the spring beauty and all the sedge and all the winterkill were not enough:
The bears came down into the valley when cows were calving; they smelled blood and it was good,
but the people rose up over their fiefs of flesh, and so, in time, the lords fell, and the stewards,
and the kingdom was lost, all for the want of a killing frost.