Poetry – Laughter as the ship goes down

Posted on by Opher

Laughter as the ship goes down

Laughter

As the ship goes down;

Entertainment

To distract.

No need for thought

As everyday

We pay

Our income tax.

As forests burn;

Flesh fries;

Guns crash

And creatures die.

The chauffeur

Is greed.

The mantra

Is fun.

As long as we are Ok

For now

There is no need to fear.

Everything is alright

In Eden

Isn’t it?

There is nothing we can do;

Nothing we can say.

So let the avaricious fools

Get on with it

As we play the day away.

Opher – 9.5.2016

Laughter as the ship goes down

If you want to be popular you produce fun things for people to read and avoid anything with gravity. If you want to attract a following you avoid all subjects that can cause division or distress. No mention of death, politics, war, environmental destruction or social conditions. No hint of trouble in paradise.

You keep things uncontentious.

We can produce nice humour-filled pieces of fun.

We can report on entertaining films and books.

We can write about everyday life.

We can do safe fashion and style, or perhaps cookery and meals.

We can write about inconsequential trivia and pop culture.

Meanwhile, just over the hill, they are strip-mining the wilderness, pouring effluent into the river, skinning dogs alive, bombing hospitals, burning people in cages, indoctrinating children to hate, poaching elephants and rhinos, slaughtering chimps, producing more children than can be kept alive, playing in sewage, dying in droves and filling the torture chambers.

But I see that Doom has just been released on PlayStation.

Poetry – By the carpark

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By the carpark

By the carpark

Where the wood one stood;

By the stream

Long since culverted in;

Where the new housing estate now stands

On what used to be a marsh,

A vole hides among the rubbish.

Near the runway

For the new airport;

By the side of the new field

Reclaimed from wasteland;

Alongside the new road

Bringing travellers to and fro;

On the roundabout

That used to be a copse,

A tiny mouse shivers

Under a newly planted shrub.

Opher 18.4.2016

By the carpark

I was sitting on the bus going back to pick up my car. It gave me a higher view over the hedgerows into the fields beyond. I could see all the new builds.

As we approached the town there was more and more. New estates were springing up. The trees, streams and ponds were disappearing along with the remaining patches of wasteland. Even the word wasteland betrays the attitude. If it is not being built on or used for agriculture it is wasted.

So where do the voles, mice, hedgehogs, newts, frogs and toads go? Is there space foe the lizards, slowworms and snakes? Are we sanitising the countryside of insects?

I looked out over the fields and all the birds I see are pigeons, crows, magpies and sea-gulls – the scavengers. They are having a fine old time.

But how far can we continue pushing nature into the periphery before it runs out of room?

Is it all going to be ploughed fields, manicured lawns and ornamental shrubs?

How many creatures are shivering in the wreckage of their homes?

Poetry – On The Run

Posted on by Opher

On the Run

On the run

Through the trees

Down the rivers

To the sea.

On the run

Through the smoke

From the poachers

You and me. 

On the run

Without a clue

To all of this

Insanity.

All on the run

On the run

Run

Run

Run.

Opher 14.4.2016

On the Run

I had this image, from a photograph imprinted in my brain, of a poor lemur in Borneo looking utterly bewildered as it stumbled along a fallen tree that had probably, up until that day, been its home. All around it were bonfires of flame and smoke, massive bulldozers and chains, with men in yellow hardhats carrying chainsaws.

In the foreground was gouged red soil, jagged stumps and ripped trees. In the background was pristine jungle.

The image was frozen in time.

I wondered what happened to the petrified creature. Did it stumble back into the jungle? Did one of the brutalised workmen dispatch it?

It was just one more pathetic victim of the inexorable destruction of the forest. It was of no consequence. In the big scheme of things it was of no significance whatsoever. I wanted to shout at it to run, run run………… while it had a chance!

I was much too late. Its fate had already been decided.

All over the planet, in every corner of the world, the trees are falling, the bonfires burning and the creatures are ripped out of existence.

The trouble is that there is fast becoming nowhere for them to run to.

Poetry – Making Cash

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Making Cash

There’s a man who makes a lot of cash

Selling the planet

For the midnight bash;

Supplying the bombs

To the men

Who don’t care,

To the ones

That the rest of us

Try to beware.

But all the cash

In the world

Won’t buy

A dodo.

They had it all

And they just let it go.

Opher 26th March 2016

Making Cash

I was watching the Night Manager – the John Le Carre story about the arms dealer. It was making me angry. There are a lot of people out there who would do anything for cash.

You can buy a hit-man, an elephant tusk, or a rhino horn from an unscrupulous thug. The torturers, despots and tyrants buy their tools and weapons from dealers. Britain is an arms-dealer.  They are not all shady characters who hide in the background.

I have just returned from a voyage to South America. It brought home to me all over again the destruction of the environment, the massive slaughter of wild-life, the huge expanding numbers of people, the inequality and poverty and the wasteland we are making of the planet.

Nations plunder their resources. Jungles are chopped, strip mines gouged, seas polluted. Fish are scooped out of the sea using radar and huge trawls in industrial numbers. Nothing is sacred.

What once was plentiful is now scarce.

The whole world is being designed to be run as a tourist theme park.

The rich live in their four million dollar apartments and the poor scratch a living from the corrugated iron shacks along the river bank.

It could have been so different.

Who cares about a sloth? Who gives a monkeys?

Poetry – Take me back to

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Take me back to

Take me back to the African plains;

Away from the bombs of the insane;

Away from the craziness of god’s refrain;

Away from the missiles and blood stains;

Away from every human brain;

All the bones of the animals we have slain;

The trees that rot where they’re lain.

I’d send the whole lot down the drain

And start over again.

So I could wonder at the universe

In one sand grain

And find the will

To refrain

From slaughter.

Opher 22.2.2016

Take me back to

As I walked around the deck of the Marco Polo and thought about the immense changes that have taken place in the last two hundred years I kept reworking this poem.

I’ve travelled through oceans that once teemed with life and are now empty.

I visited islands where British ships replenished their larders by bludgeoning to death all the indigenous creatures.

Two hundred years ago life teemed. Now it is hanging on by its talons.

I am ageing in fits and starts on a slow decline towards an inevitable death. The planet is on a similar trajectory.

In the next two hundred years we will have paved it all, caged what’s left and be living in an artificial, plastic paradise, as free as any good consumer can be.

Take me back to where I can breathe and wonder. I want out of this nightmare.

Poetry – Life Goes On

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Life Goes On

The sea is all around

Without a single speck of life.

No dolphins frolic in these bow-waves.

The forests are silent

Without the buzz of insect,

Rustle of creatures,

Or chirp of birds.

All is garbage,

Rubbish and desolate wasteland,

Baking in the heat.

Towns overflow with poverty and despair.

Life is sucked dry

By the sheer weight of numbers.

What teemed is now sterile.

What sang is now silent.

What lived is now barren.

What they call life goes on.

Opher 23.1.2016

Life goes on

I was struck by the absence of life as I travelled around South America. We sailed for days through seas devoid of life. There were no dolphins, whales or porpoises. There were a handful of seabirds. Days would go by without a single booby or frigate bird.

On land it was the insects that were missing. Apart from the flies at Cape Verde, everywhere else was quiet. I was used to the chirping of cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers, but the Amazon forest seemed quiet. There was no profusion of life. Without insects there are not the animals that feed on insects, there are not the pollinated plants.

It felt as if I was witnessing the slow death of a planet. The buzzing meadows of my youth had turned silent. Now the rainforests were following suit. The seas were becoming wildernesses.

Everywhere we went there was poverty, people sleeping rough on the streets, in shacks and shanties, desperate for work, food or shelter. Teeming millions reaching out into the wilderness and consuming anything that moved, clearing vegetation and creating garbage filled wasteland out of pristine jungle.

Too many people; too few living creatures. It did not need projecting far into the future to see the outcome.

Poetry – Get it over quick

Posted on by Opher

Get it over quick

Gorillas, whales and baby seals

Rhinos, Elephants and quail

Remnants in the undergrowth

We have blasted them to hell

Forests, land and water

Air, us and sea swell

A job that’s well worth doing

For the pleasure or the sell

Caged, tortured, maimed

Hunted, poked, impaled

Badgered to extinction

Even bugs are not doing well

Why take the time to do it slow

Why not get it over quick?

Put life out of its misery

Let’s kill the planet now

Don’t just leave it sick!

Opher 16.10.98

Sometimes I just despair at the madness. We are gaily going about our lives as if there is nothing wrong. As long as our daily existence is not affected we do not have to think about it. We are not looking into the future; at the plastic nightmare round the corner.

Yet there is a relentless catastrophe taking place like a slow-motion explosion. The world population is increasing alarmingly, the environment is being destroyed, animals are hunted, butchered and hounded to extinction, forests are being eradicated, pollution is accruing, the seas over-fished, and the climate is now changing.

Welcome to the Anthropocene Apocalypse.

Yet the greed and selfishness that are fuelling this relentless pulverisation in the name of greed, profit and progress shows no sign of abating.

There are occasions when I become so distressed that I think we should just blast the planet to hell and have done. A quick end would be better than this slow, drawn out agony.

Unless something radical is done on a global scale the wild-life of this planet is doomed. Their future is a misery. The cruelty is unimaginable.

I wrote this poem way back in 1998 in a fit of pique.