THE ANCESTRAL LANDS

Go on! Bring in your heavy machinery
the oil and money men, contracts, construction, roads, smoke and pollution, noise!
Bring in your tricksy legislation
to authorise the swindle
- where the lone eagles
swirl their arcane geometries
against the purest blue
and the desert fox curls in a red rocky cleft out of the midday sun;
where the ancient peoples
treasured the ground itself
and danced their ceremonies
to the drum.
The only marks they made or left,
were heaps of stones
in the wind-tufted canyons.

Madness stalks the Earth.
Policies of governance in many lands
are run like markets
by ignorant demagogues,
top-heavy bunches
of opportunists and moguls.
Real-estate is all that matters
- with what it contains -
the deals to be made, materials extracted, spaces to be carved up
and sold.
Even the elements themselves,
defiled and put to use.

Anger and outrage stir up deep
in my core like erupting lava,
an irrepressible uprising
beyond any emotion,
beyond my personal self,
where our collective roots merge as one:
a primordial scream
reverberating outwards
in a shock-wave of horror,
of group pain and desperation
in the worldwide grief
for our precious Home.

People strive in whatever way they can:
litigation, judicial reviews, appeals,
mass sit-ins, protests, even die-ins
for vanishing forests, sinking islands, poisoned air, against land-grabs,
rubbished waterways
and every sort of Intentional devastation that ingenuity and greed can devise.

While the Media begins to wonder:
Is there really something amiss?
Might there be a story here?
That people go crazy,
on shooting sprees
or dive en masse into deadly ideologies,
jump off bridges and cliffs in droves,
are grid-locked on the ground
and suffocated by fumes in the air
strangled by plastic in the oceans
wondering why, in our long-living, enlightened, techno-Age
with its know-it-all conceit, robotics
and think-tanks,
more and more die of heart disease, dementia and desperation;
more are homeless, hungry
and war-ravaged;
to fight for fresh water, clean air
even as the Ecosystem Itself
with all its life-forms cries out
by flood, drought and fire.

While the myopic human-whatsits
bickers over petty details of precedent,
dividends, ego, being right, getting more.
More oil rigs, fracking sites, mines
Palm oil plantations, cattle ranches,
wind farms, dams….
called investment, but really
panicked displacement activities
to maintain the status quo, petrol pumps
lights on, planes and trains going, universal WiFi access
lest the voters get uppity.
Longer term considerations
(apart from dynastic aggrandisement)
are not in the business model
- leave that to everyone else’s grand-kids.
Easier - and more profitable -
to focus on inventing
lucrative wonder drugs and procedures
- and find the obscene side-effects later.
Build nuclear reactors at sea-level
and on seismic fault-lines
- and find what happens later.
Demolish the trees and bees
- and discover the effects later….
on and on, through the generations
down the centuries
as if anticipation, perspective,
learning from experience
is beyond an option, impossible.

Take a break!
Watch a disaster movie instead.