Climate change is a topic that will intersect the headlines for many years, well after Islamic terrorists and refugee crises, crumbling Euros and size zero models have joined Colonialism and races up unclimbed mountains as paragraphs in history texts. This will be a constant, up there with royal babies and celebrity bad hair days as topics of continual newsworthiness. Will the opinion formers have good news to impart? I hope so but in anticipation that they will not I have penned two sonnets to capture the unremitting misery that rising temperatures might impose…
A Springless Future
Cold Jack, content and job well done, crept home
Allowing Spring her turn to warm the earth.
Crocus tongues pushed out through softening loam
As glass-eyed shepherds watched their flock give birth.
We, unplucked youth, prime cocked with urgent sap,
Felt the tug of Nature’s call to breed.
Like sheep, we followed Her bewitching map
To plant, in fertile earth, our febrile seed.
Yet somewhere Nature’s diverse scheme was lost;
Our black-fuelled lust seared seasons into one.
Our greed has neutered Jack; he’s become a ghost,
Sharp fingers culled by a remorseless sun.
Why would our lambs breed, given this breach of trust?
We’ve fried this once green Earth, turning it to dust.
Global Warning: The Future’s Hot
His skin is a sticky backed plastic,
One he made earlier. A white
Crust forms, pores oozing their oily mastic,
Like a shield displaying the toiler’s blight.
He bows his head against the drooping sun,
Leans into the teeth of the harsh solar wind;
Effortful tears round his farrowed eyes run,
Each suppurating drop leaving him blind,
False-stepping from trimmed field to tangled Web,
While arrogant man thinks he’s in control;
The future’s a desert, his life-waters ebb,
Jet-glazed, he continues his skills to extol.
For our children the tide will lap them with dust;
Our bequest will be fields we have covered with rust…
TanGental 
Indeed. We can no longer ignore the warnings. What a dismal future. Like the way you use your brush. 🙂
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Yes, rather gloomy mindset in these ditties!
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Some scary stuff ahead of us Geoff, if we don’t heed nature’s warning.
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Great poems though I hope you are wrong too Geoff, in fact I’m sure you are wrong. There are too many good people doing good work – they tend not to get air time because it’s not in the media mogul’s interest to do so. It is only the ignorant and greedy who continue unabated – and the stupid who wait for someone else to clean up the mess they are partly responsible for…… [is that too harsh?] There are a horde of young people who are changing things too – look for them, look for the hope 🙂
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Yes that’s my hope. Sense is beginning to prevail and we have a track record of sitting ourselves out so here’s hoping. And I’m head on enjoyed the poetry!
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I love your organic prose and certainly hope you are wrong but after a 4 year drought in CA I rather doubt it!
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Thanks Jan. Organic prose! I’ll take that!
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You paint a chronic picture Geoff yet unfortunately a true one unless Governments start taking the problems more seriously and banning the things that are destroying the earth, deforestation for a start and even fracking which our Government is trying to put through permissions for.
Hugs
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I do hope so; but we’ll probably kill ourselves off before nature does it, so the earth will recover for the next stage of life
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I teach my children this. Whatever else matters (and some of it does) nothing will really matter if we’re not here anymore. Since my little one asks for trees to be planted for holiday and birthday gifts , I know it’s getting through. We are but one small droplet… I just don’t understand.
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We decided to twin toilets fir Christmas this year. Our families now have pictures of African toilets in their privies!!
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