Four poems written in March so far

Mirage

The dream so real
She felt she was there
Walking in the scorched desert
A softness of sky rimming the dunes
Making a bowl
To carry a wealth of scarcity.

How thirsty she was
Weak from it
She ached for water
Like lovers long for each others’ bodies.

The mirage shimmering
Just beyond her reach
Oil-glossy, thick,
Promising coolth,
Satisfaction.

A sticky anticipation of delight,
Ebbs into an emptiness of disappointment,
As the water eludes her,

No matter how fast she moves towards its glittering promises.

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Conduit

For long now
It has been blocked
The tunnel full with ragged plastic bags, dead branches
Washed down from the townships.
The water tainted with faeces.

Stagnant as oil sludge
It pools,
Dirty,
Like unresolved pain.

The concrete hollow sticks out over the beach
Into the shallows of the sea
A barrel of a gun
Facing down the waves
that lap at its mouth

Years ago,
The girl walked there with her mother
Speaking of who she might become.

Now she walks there alone
Wondering, in the shadows

How she will ever know, let alone say,
What it is she needs to say.

Poisoned water bleeds out of the conduit
Fanning the sand beneath it
Into delicate patterns,

The woman holds a glass shard,
smoothed by the sea.

Stands indeterminate

At the edge of the stream
Waiting,
For the clear water to come.


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Paul’s art

In the cool bank vault
Of the exhibition space

the wave splices the TV monitor
and the surfer in endless summer loop
abseils down its two faces
over and over,
carefully, gently, tracing the water’s warp,
its weft.

The meditative metaphor
Is too contained.

She wants to see
The sluice-gate in the dam wall open
And the water ejaculate beyond it.
In a sheer plume.

She wants to abandon herself
To the work,
Drown in its turbulence,

Find
Fury.


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The Dead Zone

‘For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind...’ ~ Hosea 8:7

In the online media
she reads of a Southern Baptist preacher in the US
who said: harming the environment is like ripping pages from The Bible.

She reads too of the Dead Zone
In the Gulf of Mexico
Where algae blooms on nitrates
Pushed downriver from factories
Beautiful flowers
Starve the fish swimming in the water below of oxygen.
Now biofuel crop pesticides will make sure it gets worse, not better.

It’s a litany of loss
What she learns every day
Examining pictures of the fragile Earth
Taken from space
Trying to decode before-and-after pics,
Chinese deltas eaten into by industry
like X-rays of a wound -
Topographies transformed
By greed.
Red rivers bleed into sick oceans.

She remembers
Walking next to the lagoon with her father at night,
Chris Rea’s song from the eighties
The Road to Hell,
Blaring from a parked car.
How prophetic it seems now.

Which page
Shall we tear out next? She wonders …
The one where it says:
Love your neighbour as you love yourself?
- Climate change will create millions of environmental migrants –
The wars over resources are here already,
Darfur scorched,
The Sahel burning.

Or perhaps, the one with these words imprinted on it:
‘you shall go out with joy,
And be led forth with peace,
The mountains and the hills shall burst forth before you?’

A memory of
Of a vision she saw as a child from the kitchen door of her father’s friend, the woman priest -
The green trees of her garden
Incandescent, merging with the sunlight,
Like grace,
As beautiful as a melody,
Just there, immaterial.
Heartbreaking.
Going, going, gone
Irretrievable
An acre of rainforest a day razed,
For burgers.

Will it be the gold-edged page
(she is holding her grandmother’s King James Bible)
Which says
“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then
Face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I am known?”

It is the knowledge of what is to come, almost certainly now
That she fears, more than the binding darkness
The fearful anticipation
Of the fires, the floods, the plagues,
Waiting in the wings,
Weary villains.

‘There is nothing love cannot face;there is no limit to its faith?’
She is ashamed
To be seen by that shimmering world she knew once, as a child,
Her kind has betrayed it.

She does not want to be fingered as one of the species
Who thought it was Icarus
Flew so close to the sun,

Arrogant,
Unthinking,

Plummeted as the heat
Melted his wings of wax.
Sheer artifice, destroyed.


‘For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.’

The pages are falling
To the ground
Like handfuls of earth
At a funeral.

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