“On the Coming Extinctions” by Charles Martin

Attribution: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On the Coming Extinctions

Suppose there was an app that let you know
Before you ordered at Ye Old Clam Shack
The scallops with their flesh as white as snow,
The blushing salmon or the wild-caught hake,
The bass just lifted from a nearby lake,
If they’d been harvested sustainably;
Suppose there was an app that let you track
Which ones were now at risk or soon to be:

They could be saved by this technology.
The app is here: I have it on my phone,
I told a friend, who answered, “I don’t see
Groupers at all. What list are groupers on?”

Endangered—they can barely hold their own…

She said, “That makes it easy to decide:
Waiter, I’ll have the grouper, please—pan-fried:
I’d better get mine now before they’re gone.”

Previously published in Literary Matters

About the Author: Charles Martin is a poet, translator of poetry, and essayist.  His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, The Hopkins Review and, in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ingram Merrill Grant, a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine, and a Pushcart Prize. His translation of  Ovid’s Metamorphoses won the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets.  He has published eight volumes of poetry with the Johns Hopkins University Press.