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
You may not like insects but they are the main food source for many bird species and for small mammals such as shrews and hedgehog. You would have to be particularly heartless not to like the shrew with his twitchy nose, or the delightful Mrs Tiggywinkle.
Personally I rather like the various moulds and fungus that live on the wood. I have seen some marvellous yellow bracket fungus and some rather strange shiny orange ones. More common are the plain white or brown brackets, but commonest of all around here, and delightful in the early dew or pale sunshine in the dappled woods, are the silvery types such as agaric, schizophylum commune.
