Climate Poems Poetry from Andrew Smith's online Poetry session, every Friday at 1PM. Climate The earth has a long memory & Remembers the heat Why she was born in fire - when The desire of the stars & galaxies collided to create her She bares her birth marks in the gouged landscape Covered in a thick crust of wrinkled sand The rocks of her fractured skeleton are strewn Across her wild plains Wounded from birth She smoulders beneath The earth remembers when she froze A season of 10,000 years The glaze of a whitened tundra sparkling in the moonlight Along the backbone of the creaking mountains The slow creep of glacial scraping In valleys of ice carved stone Where the rivers follow to the frozen seas The earth remembers When alien rock rained down Before she spread a charged mantle across her face To hold the heavens at bay Measure the depth of the craters In bays, fjords & lochs The scars of her pockmarked face In garlands of cacti across the stony dry badlands The earths climate protects her; When patience is required She freezes her children When things get tough She turns up the heat You can see it all around you People forget their past but She remembers hers If you look you can see the future clearly You can see it all around you On the movie screen The dry river bed You can read it In books You hear the future in speeches In protest In anger If you fear & are swayed by the voices of those who deny it Look to the forests on fire Warm your hands & Read the thermometer Andrew Henry Smith *** Climate Global warming Economic recession Virus pandemic Racial tension rising. The climates Of the world Are not in balance. And how we feel, Our emotional climate, Reflects all Of this turmoil. Difficult to feel In equilibrium Surrounded by Disease, worry, conflict. But despite it all We live, We love, We laugh. Charlotte Palmer *** Untitled 'C' is for climate, on which we rely; 'L' is the level of the sea that's getting higher; 'I' is for interference - humans are good at that; 'M' is for the message of the melting polar caps; 'A' sounds like a question mark for all those that deny; 'T' is Greta Thunberg, a hero and defier; 'E' is for exhaust fumes, extinctions, existential crises, energy efficiency, elemental physics, elongated summers, extreme weather of all kinds, and the exhaustion of an asthma attack. We're lucky to've been born in a temperate age with a green and fertile land as our stage. We complain about the heat and the rain and the cold but we're lucky we won't live to 400 years old to see Anglia sinking and the Arctic ice free - with the Gulf-stream shut down, what'll Britain's future be? Globally, fires and droughts and floods become common - the ground, it is baked hard, or else it is sodden; as weird weather increases, is it time to unite, to pick up the fight, to stand in solidarity with future generations and refuse to accept political explanations that defend the status quo! Can lockdown be a turning point, helping us value clean air, birdsong, and this Earth, our home?! I don't know but I hope so. Let's not be overcome by the destructive distraction of inaction. Russell Durling *** Climate Each day, April to May, continuing into June, we wake to unseasonable sun. Lockdown weather has lifted us from global gloom, enhancing our confined freedoms, a daily walk, garden-time. Weather is not the same as climate. Weather varies day by day, week by week year by year. It is not uncommon for weather to be uncommonly hot or cold, wet or dry. Stay-home rules begin to ease as I breathe in the scent of drought-dry grass and administer water to drooping plants. I long for the old normal; I long for rain. Sarah Evans ***