What do you love most and not want to lose to climate chaos?
Introduction
Reading – Genesis Chapter 1 & 2
Lights
If you can, please, turn off your lights to as a symbolic gesture that you are connected with a world wide earth hour community
Welcome
A Litany of Confession
Response
Except for the lone wave by Grace Nicolls
Like a heiress drawn
to her light-reflecting jewels,
Atlantic draws me
to the mirror
of my oceanic small days
and the old seawall, so beloved by all.
But Atlantic is far out,
beach deserted in the mid-day sun
except for the lone wave of rubbish –
old car tyres, plastic bottles, styrofoam cups –
rightly tossed back
by an ocean’s moodswings.
Undisturbed, not even by a seabird,
I stand and gaze into the tradewinds –
discovering that the sun
is the only eldorado, the only gold
whose rays will grace and sear our skins.
Like a tourist, I head back
to the sanctuary of my hotel room
to dwell on change and age
and our brooding planet
in the air-conditioned darkness.
Water is Company by Ruth Padel
You close your eyes so you can’t see the omens.
You try praying for rain. You wait
for an augury, sing to the brook
while the self flies out and away
like a bird from a withered branch
and the wind, with a hollow sound
like a breaking pot, whips the lake to a dance
of bubble-froth soap-suds, blocking the drain.
Inheritance by John Agard
If we, the children of the meek,
should inherit an earth
whose rainforest lungs
breathe a tale of waste –
an earth where the ailing sea
shudders in its own slick
If we, the children of the meek,
should inherit an earth
where the grass goes nostalgic
at the mere mention of green
and the sky looks out of its depth
when reminded of blue
If we, the children of the meek,
should inherit such an earth,
then we ask of the future
one question: Should we dance
or break into gnashing of teeth
at the news of our inheritance?
Earth Speaks by Rachell Glass
This poem was written in 2017 and won the 19-25 year old category in the Poetry Society’s climate change ‘Turn the Volume Up’ poetry challenge.
This
is not a disaster movie:
no second takes
or Jake Gyllenhaal to save you.
Are you scared yet?
This is real: the suffering, the struggle,
the survival. Like exhaust fumes,
the truth is hard to swallow.
Are you scared yet?
Here’s the Facebook livestream of all the failed crops, the floods, and the famines.
You can’t pause or rewind this apocalypse.
Are you scared yet?
Here’s the proof, the evidence, the statistics,
rising like my temperature,
like the sea levels, like litter on the highway.
Are you scared yet?
I am suffocating from your fantasies and fairytales.
Hear the mermaids drowning in your oil spills?
See the unicorns choking on your plastic and greed?
Are you scared yet?
Are you scared yet?
Go on, ignore me, turn a blind eye.
You are so very good at that.
Change.
Turn down the lights, turn up the volume:
speak, shout, scream until you need
my oxygen, until I can hear you.
Change.
Breathe. Listen.
Yesterday, exclusively third world countries.
Today, your next door neighbour.
Change.
Take off your boots,
lose your carbon footprint
and walk barefoot.
And just
change.