Michaelmas, 20..? #poetry #Earthweal

‘Michaelmas daises, purple in the border’
so we once sang at school,
I gave it not
a second thought.

What flowers bloom now to adorn this
Autumn coronal?
What hands are joined to celebrate the bounty of
the Earth?

A connected world, with hands divided,
empty, united
only by greed, the need
to plunder every last resource

till we are left resourceless
empty-handed, still
hands once filled with
meaningless possessions

scramble for remaining scraps of food.
‘Human Resources’
that’s what we’d become
before the Fall:

We didn’t recognise the irony
of our own language,
business-minded, turning everything
into an inexhaustible resource

or so we thought;
not only empty hands but empty stomachs now
tell quite another tale:
We are no longer fearless whale-hunters, rather

fearful Jonahs
cowering in the belly of the whale.

Written for earthweal weekly challenge: An Anthropocene Michaelmas. Brendan wonders ‘what Michaelmas festival poems of the Anthropocene look like.’ He asks us to write one. I tried to imagine a Michaelmas some time this century when we have finally used up every last natural resource. I hope we never get there. As Brendan concludes:

‘Maybe the music can only sound ironic and dreadful; maybe not. It is up to us to find out.’

I found this video on YouTube. It’s a song I used to sing at school, when ‘Global Warming’ was already a concern but laughed off by politicians as a fringe issue. Now even ‘Global Warming’ has had a P.R. job and been reimagined as the less threatening (and more natural) sounding ‘Climate Change.’ Come on, everyone: let’s stop sugar coating everything. Time to wake up and provide a future for our children.

I’m also linking this post to dVerse — Poetics — The Vatic Voice. Tonight, dVerse is hosted by Lisa who asks for a poem in or about the Vatic Voice. In my case, this is a poem of prophesy. It was written in stream-of-consciousness style in which I gave vent to all the worries I have about the problems we are facing as a species.