RHAPSODY FOR OURKIND

By Whittinghame Water, from lint-soft bank,
Watching rain, could there have been just nothing?
Far better not to think a thing so deep,
Save focus for the stardust what we are,
Alighting stallions to brighter times –
Inside deadly marshes are we wander’d,
This existential crisis of an age,
These flailings of a fake democracy,
Sustaining manipulative systems
& corporate institutions hell-bent
On step-by-step destroying Human Rights
But hope remains – each fresh generation
Of conscientious, ecological
Citizens, holding singular aegis
Of putting Planet First, above all things,
Descry how votes for establish’d parties
Are signatures on the World’s death-warrant;
Let us reject the regret of hindsight,
The stakes have never been as high as this,
World! If we lose this one we lose it all!
& if enough of us believe in Change
Then Change must come, no roof shall stay these dreams,
When the next, new, novel evolution
Has never been been more vital for Ourkind.

OF BARDS  & DRUIDS

Pendragon sword, Lord Ollamh of the North,
Returns in testing times, the Arts demand
Embroidering six colours into words
While contemplating Hoo’s expanding wings,
Variegated unto royalty;
Whenever signs & omens overwear
Across the mossy-dappl’d turf we rise,
Heaving our hearts up raggy heathermoors
Sat before the very vaults of Heaven
Above the kerbside hopes of Human youth
Upended as if brawlers roll’d a cart
Upon itself, & scatter’d dreams like fruit
Whose are the hands which bend the axle’s truth
Whose are the boots which crush the fruits to pulp?
The answers are brave truths to understand,
Tho’ some ken scatter’d portions well enough,
To place each piece together from the pile,
& make the puzzle whole is how I’ll go
& how I’ll sing my song, no tender lay
Of love is this, but heed my Druid Call;
The mistletoe is paling on the oak,
But if our caring hearts bind in one fold,
There’s nothing on this Earth we cannot do,
To save our home from ruin’s rough demand!

VISUALIZING TRUTH

As Gallileo’s ears were sent twitching,
By Flemish invention, but understood
‘Twas founded on science of perspective,
Making a magnificent instrument
With magnification of one times ten,
When, from the top of the Campanile,
Spying lamps hung on ships two hours away,
He turn’d his magic eyeglass to the moon
Saw comet-splatter’d surface uneven,
Deep chasms & vast protuberances,
So swung his piece to pierce the trailing stars,
O what a beautiful sight to behold!
The first on Earth to feel persuasive truth;
Galaxy myriads, Jupiter’s moons,
Portraiting proof Coepernicus correct,
The Third Reality replaced by truth
But churchmen, fearing for their merchandise,
Defamed the pair blasphemers, fled the face
Of God, belying understanding;
Let us self-int’rested agendas
Identify, when with a global sweep,
We’ll turn our apparatus on the skies
Penetrate universal deceptions
Find moons of cool integrity & truth.

FROM LOFTY VANTAGE

If we gaze on the Earth from high Heaven,
None would ever see pensweeps, dipp’d in blood,
Delineate imperial carve-ups,
Only nautral patchworks of terrain,
But Humans conjure borders in our minds,
The Us & Them mentality still thrives,
Implemented by richer nation states
Creating ghetto countries to exploit,
Exacerbate demeritocracy!
Flagellants, seeking opportunities,
Seen via TeeVee’s kapital trappings,
Try mortgaging age-old family farms,
Raising unfair funds to sit in freezers
Attach’d to trucks’ containers at Calais,
Sending family group-texts before ice
Seizes lungs, hardening heartpulse bloodflow;
While elsewhere in this global apartheid,
Others overload in Libyan dinghies,
Rapidly sinking to the bawl of tears,
It is the poor who maturate the rich,
Enabling children in the Western malls
To choose the choicest chain-chomps in t-shirts,
While gaggles of gargoyles, downtown Mumbai,
Drool cold hunger into well-lit windows.

MASS MEDIA MANIPULATION

Possession of the truth no longer stands
In the people’s hands, but with liars’ lies
Big business distorts perceptions of truth
To undermine democracy, disgrace
Which dreams up ever more terrible schemes
To influence our thoughts & behaviours
Propaganda’s daily inculcations
Evil infiltrating populations
With falsehoods, creating utter chaos
Assaulting every aspect of our lives
Normalizing the worsening of lives!
Planting hate-triggers into angry guts
Whose dull, fat maggots, burrow into hearts,
Restrict individual faculties
Dividing unbreakable families
Moulds spiritless, enervated beings
Even the so-call’d intelligentsia
Lousy with indoctrinated lurgy
Tows government lines, never objecting
Policies accepts unquestioningly
Forgetting or just choosing to ignore
That unless reality rooted
Beliefs & opinions never truths,
For truth is eternal, immutable!

THE CURRENT CRISIS

Blasted by banal consumerism
An ignorant & uncultured public
Enters its darkest hour, we are embroil’d
In destructions unprecedented, see
Ecosystems collapsing, seas poison’d,
Biodiversity annhialate;
Wildfires, superstorms, famine, drought & dust
Fresh water disappearing overnight
The Amazon is burning every night!
Humanity addicted to vaccines
That renders their humanity void!
Too overwork’d to even think a thought
Outwith narrated mainstream agendas –
They wish to make us animals, to strip
Our human rights, thro’ crises justified
By lies, to rearrange reality,
Such are those unfathomable evils
That sail the flooding oceans of fake news
When social media’s viral instance
Makes first impressions in the vital flash,
Poisoning national conversations
Assulting truth like mad, castrated bulls,
But like the matadors against the beast
When tyrants charge the world, stand firm & strong!

TERRA MATER

The next time you pass blossoming peach trees,
Pause, & wonder on the significance
Of beauty, let her thy deity be,
Terra Mater of the di selecti,
Her hair the elementum that is Earth,
Her ringlets cornucopias of fruit,
Canteloupe gorgeousness, this gemmy sphere
Invites the eyes to stray yonder corners
Of all we know, or rather told to know,
Like… electric cars are too expensive
& other such guff – let us count the ways
To save ourselves; first step, animation,
Next, appreciation of Mother Earth,
To cultivate her leads a pious life,
Sole survivors of the lines of Saturn,
We walk through forests to sing her praises
She kisses us when we start recycling!
Commencing our days with cereal rites
Beyond the enervation let us stand,
As if fire alarms all across the World
Went off in cacophonies together!
Rewilding ravaged nature we can forge,
Without her we are sterile, infertile,
Existless in a listless dirge of dust.

COURTING APOCALYPSE

Woven carpet sweats on a cold-stone floor
In Ecuador, once famous with colour,
Today only its threadbare fade display’d,
To the mantle trampl’d by manky feet,
Such objects are Our Planet’s grave warning,
Observe Calypso’s temple on Gozo
Eroded more in seventy summers
Than four thousand previous; sea-rims rise,
Threatening Venice & the ancient Fens,
Gorgeous Cape Flora by ogres depos’d,
The poor Great Barrier Reef falls asleep –
Meanwhile industry keeps turning, turning;
Deforestation, fossil fuels burning,
Churning in toxic cauldrons in the skies
Prodigious floods, intensifying droughts,
Devastating wildfires, withering storms,
Are like a malign tumor’s first sharp slap –
High-level international discourse
Agrees to only lower emissions
But World! These must be halted for to save
Ourselves from damage unprecedented,
Permanent, irrevocable changes,
We won this world as we deserv’d this world,
Being noble beings, but not to fight
For this world, earns us the world we deserve…

SOYBEAN SUICIDE

I saw two frogs a-mating on the track,
Frozen like ice, & then I heard the revs
Of moving car, I stood as still as stone
& watch’d them splatter’d upwards by the wheels
Goo-flesh upflashing, fry-pans spitting oil,
In those sad deaths I found a metaphor
Of how we rumbles down destructive roads,
When nihilism wastes ancyent fauna,
The shrivelling of planetary lungs;
Shame on McDonalds’ bulldozers & chains,
Of holocaustic carnage, while the tribes
Who’d spoke to Mayan gods shantytown flung,
Whose brutally appropriated lands
Grow so much soy & corn under a cloud
Of gluten intol’rance, celiac plagues
Spreading the glyphosate carcinogen
Residued in grain, sugar, other crops
Which animals feed, on these we feast in turn
Ignoring slaughter ‘cos it tastes sooooo good,
Glyphosate weed-killers poison bloodstreams
With feotuses bleeding to death in tears
‘But beautiful’ farmers of bumper crops
Reply, admiring fields where supraweeds
Ensure next year’s increas’d toxicity
& so the ship of poisoners sail on
Slow docking on isles of chronic illness!

OUTBREAK OF EVIL

The spirit of everpresent evil
Burrow’d in our planet’s social fabric
Assaults the modern psyche unprepared
Peaceful worldscapes stunned into inaction
& moral inertia, while Liberties
Flung naked into hope-sapping dungeons
We understand the presence of evil
By patterns of action long recognized
To realise its warp’d, inhuman dreams,
At first we are deceiv’d into thinking
It is a force for good, & intervenes
Succesfully in problems it has caused,
While accurately prophesying futures
Carefully stage-managed, tricks the masses
Into handing over authority
Of judgement to the grubbiest of hands,
That with an insidious arrogance
Assures itself of total obeyance
From a now terrified population.
The next step taken by this charlatan
Is lead its willing victims to the brink,
Convinces followers stake everything
On a solitary course of action
Which ends in devastating disaster!