Monday, 3 August 2015

Mark Scrivener Poetry Blog No 66 Earth Tree


EARTH TREE

I suspect that the greatest threat to civilisation is what we are busy doing to our own home: the biosphere and climate of Earth. Even without the disasters that are, I believe, already occurring through climate change, if we simply continue to expand and destroy nature that supports us where will it end? The subtle swapping of verb tenses in this poem is deliberate.






                     EARTH TREE

If earth were once a great, green tree
then breathing out the breath of life
through  thousands of  its sap-veined leaves,
all shimmering in sun,
with all the singing souls like birds,
would we regret false words
and ruination from our hands...

when all that's left
is silence and 
a black, charred stump?
Will we regret
the greed and blind neglect?
How shall we stand?

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