Lucy Koons

 
 MOUNTAIN VALLEY PIPELINE

  
 I scroll down the sterile pixelated news,
 and whiffs of paper pulp don’t hang
  
 in the air, and inky newsprint doesn’t stain
 my fingers. That transient stain as familiar
  
 as the walnut hulls years ago that turned
 our tender hands black. I don’t see those walnut
  
 trees in the images as I scroll and pause, viewing
 my childhood mountains cut open, turned
  
 inside out, the valley a gashed operating table
 with no surgeons I can see. I close my eyes
  
 and rest from the screen’s glow, and I ache
 for those shaded cool creeks with the water
  
 tickling my ankles, the stones shifting beneath
 my toes and I think of the minnows and the
  
 crawdads, and of the pixels telling me
 about sulfur dioxide and formaldehyde
  
 and all the poisons with fierce-sounding scientific
 names that I can’t picture and don’t understand.
  
 But I understand they are deadly, in the air
 and in the water, and if I pull memories I can hear
  
 the whippoorwills’ soothing refrain and the frogs’
 steady croaks and I wonder, Do they sense
  
 time running out? And I think about our citizens:
 those in tree stands, those who take no stand
  
 against corruption, and those who deem cruelty
 as blessed by God, boasting success among our ruins.
  
 And I pause. Breathing in the neutral air, I look
 at my clean fingers and scroll up the pixelated news. 

 
 Copyright 2021 Lucy Koons   

Writer’s Statement:

The poem Mountain Valley Pipeline was inspired by a Sierra Club magazine news article called In the First Person: A Fenceline Community Member Speaks Truth by Elizabeth Jones https://www.sierraclub.org/articles/2021/03/first-person-fenceline-community-member-speaks-truth. My two poems from which I selected words and phrases were (1) Woe to the Country, and (2) Creatures.

Bio:

Lucy Koons is a Virginia native who has lived more than 20 years abroad, mostly in Lebanon and Qatar. Koons is a writer and editor who began her career in Washington, DC, on Capitol Hill. Overseas she worked at The American University of Beirut and Georgetown University in Qatar. Koons’s favorite activity is going on adventures with her husband and daughter.

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