an idea or problem that cannot be fixed
Not that Broadway show, or yesterday’s “wicked cool.” No, back in the ‘60s, a seriously refurbished wicked entered the lexicon. Problems with no easy answer, impossible to get a handle on: they’re the wicked ones. If you’re thinking, that covers most of them, I’d understand. Because while I was making babies and waiting for grandchildren, maybe you were getting born as one or the other. And while scientists and engineers were blowing their gaskets, raving about these new wicked problems, the rest of us thought wicked, Middle English wikke evil, so quaint, that fine manners and swizzle sticks could fix them. Meanwhile, wicked, like a world on fire, a world in spasm, morphed into super wicked, climate change, system collapse, perpetrators and problem-solvers, one and the same. Time running out, right there in the dictionary, and with it, our future with its need for dead-on words.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 22, Issue 3.
Maryanne Hannan has published prose poems from this series in the UK, EU, Australia and USA. Her first book Rocking Like It’s All Intermezzo: 21st Century Psalm Responsorials was published in 2019 (Resource Publications). She lives in upstate New York. www.mhannan.com.
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