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

***