I've drunk water

I've drunk water
still pure, still icy
straight from its
sources at the margins
of age old snowfields
at high elevation
in high summer,
in places where
I was unable to see
to the other side
of vast white sheets
of elemental manuscript

Now, they tell me
that glaciers
where I once
climbed
crawled
sprawled
scrawled
with my own small
footnotes and marginalia
may die before I do

I can't help
but think
that this diminishing
is a form of
global illiteracy,
a senseless bonfire
of precious volumes
perpetrated by those
who choose not
to understand
that it is their children
and their children for whom
an overheated world's
long held dreams
will parch then drown
in a vanishing
rising tide of
tepid dirty meltwater
and tepid dirty air
that they bequeathed.