Sixteen words, and a title that sounds like it belongs on a geology exam. The gap between the two is where Dave Bonta's "Anthropocene" does its work. The word names the proposed age in which humans have become a force shaping the planet itself, and it comes from the Greek for "human" and "new". It usually arrives with ice cores, graphs and solemn statistics. Bonta offers a troop of monkeys dancing instead.
The central idea is that an age of planetary change may be driven less by grand design than by compulsive, thoughtless appetite. "We monkeys" is a deliberate demotion. The title's root puts humans at the centre of the story, and our species name, *sapiens*, means "wise". The poem calls us animals doing tricks. "Dance" deepens the insult. Dancing can be joyful, but it is also what performing monkeys do for a crowd, and it suggests repetition, absorption, losing yourself in a rhythm and forgetting to look up.
"Little globes of glass" is the poem's most open image, and it is worth resisting a single answer. Judging by the imagery, it could mean screens, lenses, light bulbs, snow globes or crystal balls. Screens we hold in our hands seem the most natural reading, but the word "globes" matters more than any one object. The Earth is a globe too. So we are cradling shiny, breakable miniature worlds while the real one is neglected. The scale is the joke and the warning: "little" against the planet-sized stakes implied by the title.
The sound of the poem does quiet work. The hard *g* clicks through it like beads knocking together: *globes*, *glass*, *get*, *forget*, *getting*. The third line is the hinge. "Get and forget" works because "forget" contains "get" inside it, so the word seems to swallow its own root. Wanting and amnesia are built into each other. Every new thing is acquired and then dropped from the mind, so the appetite resets and the dance goes on. We might also forget the cost, and the poem leaves that thought for the reader to finish.
The line break after "our getting" lets the noun hang for a moment before the verdict arrives. "A fatal fever" echoes the *f* of "forget", and it is the only phrase that names the stakes. It sits at the end of the shortest line, said almost lightly. Fever is a smart choice of metaphor. It is an illness rather than a crime, something that takes hold of us rather than something we decide. It also fits the older habit of calling a craze a fever, as in gold fever. Since the poem is about the planet, a reader may also hear the literal heat of a warming world, though that is an inference rather than something the poem says.
Formally the poem is spare. There is no rhyme and only one comma, and the text as given has no closing full stop, so the sentence trails off as the dance continues. The lines run four, six, seven and five syllables, building momentum through the third line and then closing in sharply. The last line has no verb at all. "Our getting" and "a fatal fever" are set side by side and equated without an "is", as if the comparison needed no argument. Many of the key words are trochees (*little*, *getting*, *fatal*, *fever*), with the stress on the first syllable, and they give the lines a skipping, lilting bounce. The poem sways along even as it condemns the swaying.
What makes it significant is how it handles scale. A huge, abstract subject, a geological epoch, is compressed into a single gesture of small, pleasurable, repeated acts. The poem's refusal of grandeur is its argument. Catastrophe here is not a villain's plot but the sum of countless tiny acts of wanting. The "we" matters too. The speaker does not scold from outside but joins the monkeys, and so does the reader. A short poem like this is hard to skim past, because it ends with a diagnosis and no cure.