Church Going

Once I am sure there’s noth­ing going on

I step inside, let­ting the door thud shut.

Another church: mat­ting, seats, and stone,

And lit­tle books; sprawl­ings of flow­ers, cut

For Sun­day, brown­ish now; some brass and stuff

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;

And a tense, musty, unig­nor­able silence,

Brewed God knows how long. Hat­less, I take off

My cycle-clips in awk­ward reverence,

Move for­ward, run my hand around the font.

From where I stand, the roof looks almost new–

Cleaned or restored? Some­one would know: I don’t.

Mount­ing the lectern, I peruse a few

Hec­tor­ing large-scale verses, and pronounce

“Here endeth” much more loudly than I’d meant.

The echoes snig­ger briefly. Back at the door

I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,

Reflect the place was not worth stop­ping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,

And always end much at a loss like this,

Won­der­ing what to look for; won­der­ing, too,

When churches fall com­pletely out of use

What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep

A few cathe­drals chron­i­cally on show,

Their parch­ment, plate, and pyx in locked cases,

And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.

Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubi­ous women come

To make their chil­dren touch a par­tic­u­lar stone;

Pick sim­ples for a can­cer; or on some

Advised night see walk­ing a dead one?

Power of some sort or other will go on

In games, in rid­dles, seem­ingly at random;

But super­sti­tion, like belief, must die,

And what remains when dis­be­lief has gone?

Grass, weedy pave­ment, bram­bles, but­tress, sky,

A shape less rec­og­niz­able each week,

A pur­pose more obscure. I won­der who

Will be the last, the very last, to seek

This place for what it was; one of the crew

That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?

Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,

Or Christmas-addict, count­ing on a whiff

Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?

Or will he be my representative,

Bored, unin­formed, know­ing the ghostly silt

Dis­persed, yet tend­ing to this cross of ground

Through sub­urb scrub because it held unspilt

So long and equably what since is found

Only in sep­a­ra­tion — mar­riage, and birth,

And death, and thoughts of these — for whom was built

This spe­cial shell? For, though I’ve no idea

What this accou­tred frow­sty barn is worth,

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A seri­ous house on seri­ous earth it is,

In whose blent air all our com­pul­sions meet,

Are recog­nised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since some­one will for­ever be surprising

A hunger in him­self to be more serious,

And grav­i­tat­ing with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

Philip Larkin

Six Degrees of Earth Fry­ing Like Bacon: ”

Theres a new TV ad air­ing these days in the D.C. area and it rep­re­sents a new low in the pol­luter PR handbook.  Paid for by an oil industry-funded front group, this ad ridicu­lously pur­ports to claim that heat-trapping atmos­pheric car­bon diox­ide pol­lu­tion caus­ing global warm­ing is actu­ally ben­e­fi­cial for the planet.  Yes, thats right, the pol­luters most respon­si­ble for cli­mate change want the pub­lic — and espe­cially policy-makers debat­ing clean energy leg­is­la­tion in Con­gress — to swal­low the lie that ‘CO2 is green.’

Brings to mind the clas­sic case study of pol­luter pub­lic rela­tions: Toxic Sludge is Good for You.

Only this effort is much more insid­i­ous.  Thats because the debate over global warm­ing is over.  The sci­ence is clear.  Any attempt to fuzz up the facts in order to fore­stall polit­i­cal and pol­icy action to address the cli­mate cri­sis is noth­ing more than a reck­less effort by dirty energy spe­cial inter­ests to pro­tect their prof­its at the expense of pub­lic health and the planet.

The time for action is at hand — indeed, it is long overdue. 

Accord­ing to the lat­est analy­sis by cli­mate sci­en­tists, global tem­per­a­tures are now expected to rise by 6.3 degrees Fahren­heit by the end of the cen­tury.  This rapid warm­ing trend is far faster than the fore­cast just two years ago by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Inter­gov­ern­men­tal Panel on Cli­mate Change.  In fact, the pre­dicted increase is nearly dou­ble what sci­en­tists say is the upper limit of warm­ing the world can afford in order to avert cat­a­strophic cli­mate change.

Achim Steiner, UNEP’s exec­u­tive direc­tor, stated at a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day that fail­ure to act now to cur­tail global warm­ing would be ‘unfor­giv­able.’  He noted that since 2000 alone, the aver­age rate of melt­ing at 30 glac­i­ers in nine moun­tain ranges has dou­bled com­pared with the rate dur­ing the pre­vi­ous two decades.

‘These are not things that are in dis­pute in terms of data,’ he added.  ‘They are actu­ally phys­i­cally measurable.’

It is shame­ful that Big Oil, Dirty Coal, and their allies will do or say nearly any­thing to kill com­pre­hen­sive clean energy and cli­mate leg­is­la­tion — leg­is­la­tion over­whelm­ingly sup­ported by Americans.

In the face of over­whelm­ing facts on the threat posed by cli­mate change, if Con­gress fails to act that would be unforgivable.

”

(Via Switch­board, from NRDC.)