surely
my first knowledge of something called “global warming”
came from an elementary textbook
too young to do anything about it then,
i didn’t think much of it;
if the problem was bad enough for
child-me to hear about,
surely the grown-ups
were on the case
three decades later
my daughter cannot play outside
because dry and brittle forests
burn hundreds of miles away,
blanketing the hemisphere in smoke
she watches grown-ups cough
as we squint through grey-orange fog
and assumes
we must be on the case