This Summer: Heat Graves

by Margery Parsons / July 12th, 2026

In Chicago
after howling, brutal winters
ordinarily we welcome summer:
the sun soothes muscles
tightened to brace for cold,
green fingers of trees reach down
to tousle our bare hair,
birds and crickets offer
gentle songs to warm our souls.
But this year
summer rolled in on waves of heat so severe
we hide inside with air conditioners
themselves polluting, warming the atmosphere.
In Europe more than twelve hundred people died
in heat too high for humans to bear.
India has fifty of the world’s hottest cities,
there and across Asia thousands die from heat each year─
heat graves.
The warning should be clear:
our planet is being cooked, fried, seared
by profligate profit-mad capitalism:
expansion, extraction, pollution, destruction
threatening the web of life with extinction─
plants, insects, birds, amphibians,
fish, reptiles, mammals, humans.
This summer
we should be like lobsters who get wise,
rise up out of the boiling cauldron,
begin to jettison this outworn system,
fight for a future
livable, sustainable,
radically different and better.

Margery Parsons is a poet and advocate for a radically different and better world. She lives in Chicago and in addition to poetry loves music and film. Her poems have been published in Rag Blog, Poetry Pacific, Calliope, New Verse News, OccuPoetry, Rise Up Review, Haiku Universe, Madness Muse Press and Illinois Poetry Society, with a forthcoming poem in Plate of Pandemic. Read other articles by Margery.

This article was posted on Sunday, July 12th, 2026 at 8:00am and is filed under Poetry.