Mother's Moving Climate Change Poem Brings World Leaders to Tears at UN
By several accounts, the most interesting part of yesterday's United Nations Climate Summit was not a speech by any of the world leaders in attendance, but a poem read by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, a 26-year old mother from the Marshall Islands.
Jetnil-Kijiner's poem, called "Dear Matafele Peinem," addresses her daughter, promising to stop the global warming and rising waters that threaten the tiny Pacific Ocean island nation where they live. (It begins at about 2:40 in the video above.) Climate change is easy to think of as an insurmountable force that's already gathered too much inertia to stop. "Dear Matafele Peinem" is a powerful reminder that that isn't true. It was enough, according to one U.N. Twitter account, to bring a few of the assembled leaders to tears.
