The Big One: 21st April

On Friday 21st April Writers Rebel held a protest outside 55 Tuftin Street, home to the ‘Global Warming Foundation’ the ‘thinktank’ of climate denial and delay. Some of us attached our poems to the pillars.. here is mine.

What gifts shall I bring to Tufton Street? 

I will bring you the aroma 

Of a million shellfish cooking where they lie 

In boiling rockpools;

The last cry of a lonely bird;

The silent columns of an empty wood; 

A meadow without bees;

An orchard with no crop of butterflies or fruit; 

The stink of cattle caged in concrete; 

An ocean of corrupted algae;

A whale rotting on an empty beach; 

The fading rattle of a child’s last breath;

A mother’s drying breast. 

I will bring you acres of blackened stumps 

And dust; 

The slosh of waves within an empty house;. 

A field of withered crops; 

A single feather drenched in oil; 

A dead earthworm in it’s poisoned soil; and 

The vomit of the cancered man who farmed it; 

A skeleton entwined with plastic. 

I will bring you a swollen bloated corpse 

Floating on the ebbing tide; 

Blackened bones and greasy ash 

From flesh. 

I’ll bring you the stench of frightened sweat; 

The smell of fear 

And shit 

Flowing through our flooded streets. 

I’ll bring you hate in too-young eyes; 

Despair in old ones. 

I will bring these gifts to Tufton Street 

And lay them at your feet. 

And then you dare – you dare – 

Tell me you’ve got this.