The Hourglass: A Poem
Once upon a time
There was a tallest of all
Sand dune at the southern shore of Lake Michigan.
The children of the settlers named it the Hoosier Slide
And then
The people dug it away and hauled it away
Turned the dune into glass jars
And the old dunes’s shoreline into a coal-burning electricity plant.
I
Fancifully, kids now call it a cloud factory -
The huge hourglass tower that
Tourists mistake it for something nuclear.
That hourglass…its years falling, like grains of sand,
Down, from
The twentieth century,
into ours
The last particles
Set to plop down soon.
Clouds rise from that cooling tower
Only to fall and mingle with the heat of
Left-over ashes spit out by the factory.
Air and ground are now
Laden with chemicals from the energy factory
Raining down through time and
Shedding carcinogens like leaves,
Into a forty-foot-deep compost heap of
arsenic, antimony, barium, beryllium, boron, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, fluoride, lead, mercury, molybdenum, radium, selenium, and thallium,
Raining down to create a sad sandy beach,
Held back from the Lake by a seawall named Disintegration.
It’s a no-child’s-land,
Not fit for men, women, or animals either…
A dangerous castle made of sand
Waiting to be
Swept into Lake Michigan.
II
And now
Generations of generating will stop.
Buildings will empty themselves of workers.
Quiet and birdsong will prevail
On poison sands.
III
But
It doesn’t have to be:
A small cadre of strident colleagues
Laying their times on the line
In honor of neighborhood lives
In honor of lives not yet born
In honor of anyone who wants to
Swim, drink, or protect healthy wildlife in
Lake Michigan’s threatened waters…
These folx, they make a little noise
Or a lot, at hearings and via their pens,
Collect dreams of kids…
Or re-dream dreams of the old slip-slidey dune
Rebuilding, restoring itself
Into clean sands with clean clouds and clean rains.
Monon Railroad Historical-Technical Society
Afterword
Nobody will mourn the passing of cremated coal when
It’s finally all hauled away, buried away, far from the waters,
Finally, the hourglass will be controlled by the sand,
No longer vice versa.
The people will protect, and the land
Will have been dreamed into the Land of Once Again
Just a beach in with gulls stealing sandwiches from the beach blankets kids,
Sandpipers feasting,
Clean rains sparkling onto the waters, onto lovers, poets, wanderers…
This will be the time to come,
Electricity will flow from sun and wind.
It’s a transition
It’s a hard transition.
We’ll make it just.
A Note From Cheryl
I wrote this poem about the imminent decommissioning of the NIPSCO Michigan City Generating Station because of all I have learned through my efforts with JTNWI. Every aspect of the plant closing is so emotional. I knew a good poem about the situation wanted to take shape, and I put pen to paper! It is a problem with everything in this age - the things society once thought were fine are not, and well, now, we have to deal with the...solutions!
