Welcome to the Anthropocene

Alice Major observes the comedy and the tragedy of this human-dominated moment on Earth. Major’s most persistent question—“Where do we fit in the universe?”—is made more urgent by the ecological calamity of human-driven climate change. Her poetry leads us to question human hierarchies, loyalties, and consciousness, and challenges us to find some humility in our overblown sense of our cosmic significance.Now, welcome to the Anthropoceneyou battered, tilting globe. Still you gleam,a blue pearl on the necklace of the planets.This home. Clouds, oceans, life forms span itfrom pole to pole, within a peel of airas thin as lace lapped round an apple. Fairand fragile bounded sphere, yet strangely tough—this world that life could never love enough.And yet its loving-care has been entrustedto a feckless species, more investedin the partial, while the total goes unnoticed.— from “Welcome to the Anthropocene”