Newsletter sign up

Be the first to know when new American Life in Poetry columns are live.

Column 866

Love in a Time of Climate Change

10.25.2021

Craig San­tos Perez packs into this love son­net, Love in a Time of Cli­mate Change”, echoes of many famous love poems, from Eliz­a­beth Bar­rett Browning’s How Do I Love Thee (Son­net 43)”, to Shakespeare’s Son­net 18”, to Neruda’s Son­net XVII”. In the title, he alludes wit­ti­ly to Gabriel Gar­cia Marquez’s nov­el, Love in the Time of Cholera. But to what end, one may ask? To remind us of the per­sis­tence of love through times of cat­a­stro­phe and change over the course of his­to­ry, and to remind us that in clever and sen­si­tive hands, a recy­cled” love song can seem fresh cur­rent and deli­cious­ly urgent.

Love in a Time of Climate Change

I don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals,
conflict diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that cause
war. I love you as one loves the most vulnerable
species: urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

I love you as one loves the last seed saved
within a vault, gestating the heritage of our roots,
and thanks to your body, the taste that ripens
from its fruit still lives sweetly on my tongue.

I love you without knowing how or when this world
will end. I love you organically, without pesticides.
I love you like this because we’ll only survive

in the nitrogen rich compost of our embrace,
so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,
so close that your sea rises with my heat.

Share this column

Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2020 by Carlos Santos Perez, “Love in a Time of Climate Change” from Habitat Threshold (Omnidawn Publishing, 2020.) Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.