The following poem is dedicated to anyone who has ever loved anything. We are the dominant species and the majority of us are kind, gentle and intelligent but sadly powerless. Unfortunately the tiny minority in positions of power are no more than pigs in fancy garb, their noses so deep in the trough they are effectively blind to the atrocities they facilitate.
Help, your planet needs you.
Newborn we are all potential
With each faltering step doors close, options diminish.
Like the foetus where cell division triggers
Chemical change determining final function.
When born, where lives, our parents
History, geography and family wealth,
These factors determine chance and future
Not our character, abilities or heart.
This dominant minority,
High
on superiority and arrogance
Trample histories lessons,
Jackboots
over ancestral knowledge .
Can we not see the futility
All human endeavour and technology
Nought but historic landfill
Worthless gadgetry and dust.
Ultimate consumers, plague of locust form
Arrogant anialistic devouring blindly
Futilely we label mine mine mine
But nothing owned is valued once the packaging removed.
Mans inhumanity to man epitomised
In the slavery of sweatshop production
Our kinsfolk used, abused, disposed of
Their plight effectively ignored.
This life, this brief existence a blink of light
Our moment on this Eden sphere
Each step should be on tiptoe
Rather than bulldozing natures beauty.
Visit the Natural History Museum.
Lie beneath the dinosaur skeleton.
You are so small and insignificant
Compared to this magnificent beast.
But it is nothing now.
For millennia it was forgot
Victorians excavated and rebuilt
This shadow of lost greatness.
If we continue to devour and trample
We will similarly be.
So protect your planets future
Step lightly on this blue orb.
To continue Good must stand and face
Mammon, arrogant dressed in couture blind entitlement
There is nothing clever in profiteering and destruction
Hold a mirror to those obese of purse and anorexic of soul
Unless the meek and kind inherit all will be lost
This graveyard planet a cosmic joke
For angels and aliens to laugh
At the futility of genocidal greed.
by Izzy Silver
Today the rain is sporadic, which is a great improvement on yesterdays constant deluge. I decided to walk the ancient ridge path from the Outdoor Centre to Croft Bank Farm as the wood would provide a natural umbrella.
The first part of the walk cuts through fields where lambs are no longer small and fragile, running to hide behind mothers fleece, but robust and stocky, standing their ground as I walk by. Their mothers in contrast look dishevelled, thick winter coats no longer needed hang from them. Like white tattered bunting rubbed off fleece scraps adorn fences and low branches.
The wood feels gloomy, almost subterranean. Yellow orchids, muddy underfoot. Bluebells, dogwood and carpets of green. The sound of a bee and the squelch of my feet accompany the song of a twittering robin. Purple violets hold my gaze whilst a wren flutters past just registering on my peripheral vision. Gentle rain recommences on the canopy of leaves. Below the fern so green is both prehistoric and architectural in form.
The stillness and permanence of an ancient landscape recorded in the doomsday book appears as was were it not for the distant sound of agricultural machine.
The scent of wild garlic, now in bloom, is delicious. The garlic's white flowers, loose globes held high on tall stems are bright chandeliers in the gloom.
The woods canopy, like the vaulted ceiling provides the perfect stage for the song of birds to resonate against.
Exiting the wood through the farmyard littered with agricultural debris of rusted tractors going nowhere, weeds growing where once engines were housed. From a nearby field the low lonely bellow of a bull as I pass mallard on the pond and sheep on the verge. I finish the walk quite wet with rain both sinew and soul exhilarated.
Gardening today I spotted a spider camouflaged in a tulip. These spiders sit and wait for another unwary insects, and then spring out and devour them. Native to many countries, until now I had never seen them in my garden before. Incredibly beautiful this one was a nervous model, and after I took the first picture it came out of the flower bell, and stood upon the edge of the bloom waving its long front legs aggressively.
