Down To Zero

Older people like me aren’t going to live to see the possible devastation of climate change, but young people will. I had already become frightened for children and what they had to look forward to when one day I walked outside and saw the sun trying to shine through the long distance smoke of the Canadian fires – a sun whose color was like the sad dark red of the emergency light in a burning building. The line popped into my head, “a redder sun than used to be.” A few months later at my friends house in San Francisco I wrote the rest of the verses.

there are no words enough to say
how a world like this could die away
how reason falls on deaf ears
truth dissolves and disappears

and the clocks are counting
down to zero

they warned us years ago
people laughed it off said “what do they know”
and we went our separate ways to find
a future facing the end of the line

and the clocks are counting
down to zero

now the weather stumbles, forests burn
past the point of no return
corporation money thrives
while refugees look for a place to survive

and the clocks are counting
down to zero

history walks the plank
its eyes are flat, its face is blank
the melting ice the rising sea
a redder sun than used to be

and the clocks are counting
down to zero

I know people who live in trees
who chain themselves to machineries
who face the judge’s scornful stare
there is no shelter anywhere

and the clocks are counting
down to zero

Standing Rock, the black snake
in times like these you do whatever it takes
wherever a line is drawn
for the people and the land they live on

and the clocks are counting
down to zero

I fear for children I see
and I don’t blame them when they look at me
as if to say “how could you?
we were depending on you”

and the clocks are counting
down to zero

I woke up in a sweat last night
so all alone I couldn’t face my fright
but I took a look around to see
millions more just like me

and the clocks are counting
down to zero

resistance goes from hand to hand
for the air, the water, the people, the land
tomorrow is born from the seeds of today
and we are going that way

and the clocks are counting
down to zero