creative writing on environmental justice
TIDINGS
A harried wind has come
bearing in his arms
ill tidings.
Ratt-a-tatting timidly
on my door,
head hanging low,
hat in hand, my rain-drenched wind
pleads to be let in.
But I do not want him
in. I quickly shut my windows, and
stuff all the nooks and crannies.
I even cotton up my ears,
because I know.
Oh! I know. Don’t I know what my wind . . .
The repatriation flight skids off the tabletop runaway,
thundering in the tailwind.
Homing dreams crash through the optical illusion.
Breaking the pandemic shackles,
they gallop toward the gruesome gorge.
Downpour and darkness cannot immure their vigor.
They are incandescent with compassion,
forget their masks.
Excruciating voices.
They hasten . . .
I take my father’s ghost and a crochet bird nest with me. The air is clean and clear, my body is empty, and no-one mentions the war. It is January. The nest is a half-built tiny home for a tiny injured thing. The left-over yarn I’m using is messy as life, cobbled together. An emergency measure.
We already know which cities will go dry. Which will . . .
In isolation, I thought maybe nature was the answer. No other humans, just the organic Earth and everything else that lived on it. If we were the lice, then all those other plants and animals were what? The too-tiny-to-see worms inhabiting our eyelashes? All the microorganisms living on our bodies, unnoticed until something goes wrong and the benign skin bacteria . . .
One thing that’s been blooming in this coronavirus crisis is dreams. Near the beginning of lockdown, a friend told me hers: the landscape outside her house was destroyed. But it was replaced by a green cactus with kangaroo-bear hybrids lolloping round it. It seemed to symbolise devastation and enforced change, but something new and tougher was growing from . . .
They ask her if this is the end,
Armageddon, Ragnarok—is Jesus
Going to come sort this. Can it get
Worse. Winston Smith knew
Dystopia is not drama but grind,
The constant scrape of fear.
We’ve tried dramatic speeches
(Appalling, sublime); it’s time
To get on with the slow business
Of building, growing from seed,
Rejecting the martyr for the . . .
There will be rooms of people
You’ve never seen before.
And won’t again, strangers,
Brazenly loving music,
Eating dumplings, browsing scarves.
There will be breaths let out,
Unchecked; there will be strange air,
Strange beds, cafe tables
That wobble as you write.
There will be spontaneous outings.
You will linger in the ice cream shop,
Not hurry . . .
It’s been some cold four months. Even though our heaviest rainfalls happen between March and July, and are always chaperoned by intense heat, these months have been cold ones. Somehow, the months had the biting loneliness and endlessness one only gets on cold nights. Living, for those of us that haven’t died, has been like lying in a large bed in . . .
After Tim Lilburn’s poem, “Retreat.”
When I was in Desolation Sound, during the pandemic, holed up in that bay,
its mornings and green tides and ravens, reading Tim Lilburn, it was so cold
in the mornings I’d put on five layers, feed the woodstove
until the kettle started to tick.
I’d stack firewood in the afternoons, the alder bark with its islands
of sepia . . .
I’ve been interviewing artists of various kinds in New Haven since March about their response to the pandemic, and I’ve been telling people throughout that my job as a journalist has often been a real help, because I’m telling the stories of people who are adapting, people who are still working on things, who are sort of doing OK. I’ve . . .