Fire and Water

two poems on impending climate disaster

The Precise Management of Rain Height

My daughter is crying again.
But then, she is twelve, hormones are thick 
like this heat.

(Oscillating arm, quick or slow return
sprinklers with adjustable speed.)

She is scared of this monster we call summer, 
It climbs on her back and burns like a devil,

(advancing is continuous and constant.)

“Here look,” I tell her, “we have made hoses
see, your little sister is laughing in the spray!
It will be ok.”

(Water broken, unwound, rewound,
programmed rain height.)

Don’t waste your tears,
tomorrow it may not rain.

She is coiled like a hose in my arms.

And the jet bursts from the nozzle
like gunfire, let’s call it a gun.

She sees rainbows, spraybows,
perhaps hope can take this form?
This colourful nourishing arc,

from our automaton irrigation.

(first published in Well, Dam! -  poems for parching times)

(my youngest daughter walking barefoot in one of the vast monoculture fields we had next to our previous house. The fields are so large! They have giant hoses to water them and towers all around the edge to hunt creatures such as deer or wild boar that come to eat the crops)

This poem was in response to a call out for poems for a book honouring water. I have written loads of poems about water, having lived on Dartmoor for many years one literally becomes water there is so much of it. One of my outstanding memories is of it raining solidly for 3 months with no respite at all. The roads became rivers and the rivers became raging torrents. Our village was almost blocked in from the surrounding floods. 

Here in Germany it has been a bit different, the summers are so much hotter and longer the year we moved to this area it was blistering hot and we were overcome! My eldest daughter was beginning to understand the oncoming climate disaster. Looking around me I could see it in action in the dry grasses and the dust, and then there were the hoses on 24/7 to try to keep the crops from wilting. the joy of running through the arc of water the importance of that water for our food. So instead of writing a love poem to the rivers of the moor or to the ocean, I used an advert for the hoses and lifted lines out of it to make the poem above. a very different way of working for me.


Fires

How many times have I dreamed 
of our soft-as-a-flower earth?

Each night I effervesce with aurora,
bareback ride the silent comet.

Every raindrop is immaculate. 
Roof, slick with perfection.

This duvet my firmament, 
we double helix together. 

Duck feather, goose feather
migrate with me. 

This suffering I had, spirited
away. Those sounds of a terrified 
animal, I made them, set them free.

Sand blasted 
ducks, plucked geese. Migrate with me,
nude, while I drum like a storm.

Every raindrop is immaculate.
I am a drop in the ocean of human. 

Nurse the moon like a baby, I hear crying,
her chalky milk spit out.

Who will rock her? Who will mama?
Before another asteroid sets her off. 

And all the hares are running. 
All the hares are running, 
from the raging fires.

(the earth as seen from Apollo 17 1972)

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