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.

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!