July 2019
NOTE: Here are three different environmental poems. “The Gathering Host” was last month published elsewhere but I include it in Verse-Virtual, partly as a follow up to one of my June poems, “It’s Not Our Fault” but mostly because it speaks to the urgency of our times.
Blue Mountains Grotto.
-for Paul and Sue Armstrong.
We leave the high panorama and descend steeply
past smooth-barked angopheras patterned in pink and grey.
At the bottom a narrow grotto is embraced
on three sides by curving sandstone cliffs.
We walk under a low overhang.
A waterfall, drought-reduced, silvers past
and ends with musical splash in a clear sandy pool.
Ranks of fern and moss step up the steepness.
Tall coachwoods climb to light in column straightness.
A little creek exits the pool down a rock-filled gully
and where the cliff face ends a single slanting beam
splashes a patch of startling brilliance
into the grotto’s deep green shade.
Black Cockatoos.
In dappled light of cathedral forest
a small flock of black cockatoos
open giant wings to flap so slowly
they seem to float in the air,
uttering as they go a desolate lament
for creatures gone and habitat lost.
The Gathering Host.
Australia’s jewel is burning.
All along the rugged, mountainous south-west coast
of the island state of Tasmania,
rain-forests, once a tangle of towering trees and vine,
stand dry and vulnerable.
The host has ceased its gathering.
Now it attacks with a roar.
It overpowers the King Billy pines.
It plunders alpine garden and rainforest.
It gathers to scale the Walls of Jerusalem.
Its front line stretches for 1600 kilometres.
What stops it turning towards the populated east,
raging through farmland and city,
burning down to the water
before jumping channels to conquer the islands,
the sapphire splints off the mainland gem?
Only the wind which refuses to blow.
But still, it smoulders in the deep gorges
and blazes through button grass and rainforest.
Northwards, over the vast continent,
the land bakes under 40 C heat.
The Darling River runs dry.
Where only algae blooms in oxygen-deprived ponds,
a million fish lie belly up and stinking.
Starving roos die of thirst.
Koalas leave the trees in search of moisture.
The land pants and cracks and subsides.
The fear of summer spreads
as heat wave follows heatwave,
blanketing the inland,
surging over the Great Dividing Range,
oppressing the white sand beaches
and the curling blue waves.
Still fools wave lumps of coal in Parliament.
Still powerful politicians live in denial.
Still the hollow men
stuff their headpiece filled with straw
into their dry cellar.
And I ask this.
Is this the way the world ends?
Is this the way the world ends?
Is this the way the world ends?
Not with a bang.
Nor with a whimper.
But with a mighty conflagration?
-First published in “The Blue Nib”.
© 2019 Neil Creighton
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