In Their Own Words
Christopher Kondrich on “[We have to keep as much God in the ground as possible]”
[We have to keep as much God in the ground as possible]
We have to keep as much God in the ground as possible
but who is we when we hear this? Do we know who
we are, where to find us? Can we stick a pin in the map
where we live or would it be easier to pin where we don’t?
What about our actions—are they cumulative?
Do they ripple out into the unforeseen only to return
disguised as the actions of others? Are they accreting
now, as we speak? Which one of us is speaking?
If there is more than one us, which are we
beholden to? Those who have a financial stake
in burning all the God there is left?
Can we speak freely? Is there not less God to draw on,
the more we extract? And the more God
we extract, the less we treat each other
the way oil intends? Is it possible to extract from ourselves
restraint? Is it discoverable? Is restraint like love
in that it can also be withheld? Could withholdings
be explained again? Standard versus itemized deductions?
Who among us is not a dependent? Does not have
dependents? Where is the form to write
ourselves off? Have we already? Written us off,
we mean? As unable or unwilling to leave
however much God is remaining? Was it not oil who gave us
this resource, to find a use for God? Will we
just give up freely everything that God powers,
this entire God-based economy? Did we not find this
persuasive when they asked us? Who is they?
Reprinted from Tread Upon (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) with the permission of the publisher and author.
On "[We have to keep as much God in the ground as possible]" from Tread Upon
“We” can be a misleading pronoun. Its broadness can be inspiring, but it can also skirt over nuance. In the context of climate change, pundits and columnists often use “we” when discussing what must be done to address it; they mean Americans or the entire human species, but hiding in this “we” are those who are actually responsible: the oil executives who have decided to make as much profit as they can in the time there is left.
This poem, from the book-length sequence Tread Upon, is my attempt to unpack this “we,” to pull on its thread, unravel it through a series of questions. Each one pulls the thread a bit farther. I’ve broken the lines and arranged the syntax of some of the questions to reveal other questions hiding inside them. I wanted each one to be a kind of nesting doll of questions, for the poem to subvert the discourse around climate change in this way, with each question leaving the discourse on shakier ground.
There’s also the intentional confusion of God and oil in this poem; switching the two, of course, allows the poem to make much more sense, but I wanted to heighten and exploit the tension between “all that is seen and unseen,” to borrow a phrase I heard from priests in church growing up. There was also something extremely compelling to me about switching God and oil in terms of what it would be implicitly asking about control and agency, power and politics. Does oil have a kind of God-like power over the economy? What would happen if executives and corrupt politicians would just let society believe in something else?
