"this is sixth form poetry, not Keats or Yeats"
Leaky pipelines cannot excuse The vileness of your touch As it seeps malevolently From its ancient, grainy prison; Your eccentric composition Creating chemical fingerprints That dance lightly across the Soft and drifting breeze, Masking your toxic presence To finger innocuous fields Of rice and herded scapegoats With the legacy of …
Illegal logging in community forests, Oil drilling in indigenous territories, Mining concessions in native soils, These have become our warzones. Activists hailed as terrorists, While global agribusiness is Paraded as unchallenged And unchosen liberator. Forever on the right side of progress; Writing its history With cheques, And laws, And body …
Browsing through the foliage You selectively suppress The spindly growths of youth, Maintaining gaps of light Through frequent visitations To clumsily prune each trunkful Of frail and wasteful biomass. Ungainly gardeners of this Fragile, jaded home, Your disturbances reshape Wooded structures and Buried thickets; Shearing lively brushes As you …
Your barren canvas stretches Tightly across forgotten states; Caught between unforgiving waves And starry mountain peaks, Your pulse beats unhurriedly In this hibernation of solitude. Permafrost litters your landscape: Continuous, Discontinuous, Sporadic. Its frozen core A hard border to Fertile soils and Future disturbance. But as the ice begins …
Hidden behind the fragility Of a sub-Antarctic archipelago, A speck of shamrock shimmers On a sea of turquoise. Exploding into life this fleck Becomes a floating forest; Vacuous blues graffitied with Organic, dancing tones of green. Rising white beacons of sediment Carried on clandestine currents, Breathing new life …
Your recent absences have become More pronounced; The late spring evenings are no longer Alive with the industry of your approach, And the flowers in the hanging baskets On the high street fidget with uncertainty. We know that something is wrong, and So we call a meeting in the public …
Beneath the shimmering surface of the sea Lie tiny specks of hope, Inconsequential fragments of life That work tirelessly to remove The years of smut and grease Regurgitated by higher organisms. Locked in the loving embrace of these Forgettable and singular plant cells This industrial detritus falls like snow, Giant …
You struggle for breath. And reach towards the sun With yellowed fingertips; Stunted roots Can no longer drink The static water that was Once a stream. Your perfectly preserved husk Lies buried; Sheets of glass Protect your shroud from Arctic hare and polar fox; Their footsteps vibrating gently Against …
Within the temperate climes of wooded land, Disturbances are part of nature’s flow; But as the rising heat gets out of hand, The fingerprints of change begin to grow. The patchiness of localised affairs, Cannot conceal the wider cracks and tears; The global climate means it won’t be long, …
The sun-bleached earth bursts into flame, As lightning forks across the sky; A stolen gift for us to try, A burning life that we could tame. But once we gave this gift a name, We blinked the impacts from our eye; The sun-bleached earth bursts into flame, As lightning …