Fractured Shakespeare (Or Hamlets Under Gas-Sault), David Ira Kagan

Photo Wendy Lynne Lee
Conrad Weiser State Forest

It's a pleasure to be able to post David Ira Kagan's very creative version of a speech from Shakespeare's Hamlet--one we might also title "To Frack or Not to Frack."

The writer is a friend and ally whose vigilance in the preservation of the ecologies and wildlife--especially snakes--liquidated by this invading army of an industry exemplifies the sort of action to which we should all be committed. 

A modern-day-world version of  “Hamlet,” Act 3 

To frack, or not to frack: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis better in the ground to leave the gas
Within the shale offering vast fortune,
Or to frack risking a sea of troubles,
And by fracking endure them. To drill, too deep—
Drill more—and by our wells’ wealth to say we end
Our heartaches, but bring on the earthquakes
That ground is prone to! ‘Tis a consummation
Demonically to be wished. To drill, too deep—
Too deep—perchance pollute our streams: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that pollution what screams may come
When we have fouled our waters, air and soil,
Must give us pause. There’s the consideration
That makes calamity of so much fracking:
For who would bear the salt and toxins of brine,
The fracker’s wrong, the gas-man’s arrogance,
The pangs of fragmented forests, the law’s delay,
The insolence of corporate officers, and the spurns
That citizen faith in the unworthy gas industry takes,
When he himself might a fight make
With a drawn dagger? Who would frackers bear,
To wince and weep under a withered life,
But that the dread of imprisonment after defiance
(The gloomy jailhouse, in whose cells
The sentenced rot) paralyzes the will,
And makes us rather bear the fracker’s ills we have,
Than chance others that we know not of?
Thus corporations’ powers can make cowards of us all;
And thus the anti-fracker’s resolution
Must be strengthened with the well-padded cast of thought,
And resistance to great greed and graft,
With this regard should soar and swellAnd burst bravely into action.

David Ira Kagan