-
Wanting to believe in the butterfly effect
I collect a box of groceries from cold storage,
take it to the drop-in centre, break open bread rolls
fill them with salad, cheese, mayonnaise; leave goofy notes
about extra cucumber for beauty treatment, or vegans,
in the hope that giving migrates invisible currents
to distant continents, pollinates oil barons’ and despots’ hearts —
They feel their hearts!
Yet our children watch polar ice-caps collapse on TV;
learn to say sixth mass extinction with furious fluency,
choose to walk to school all weathers, forego meat and dairy food,
their eyes the soot of burnt-out stumps.
Other days, they kneel with us, postures half hopeful, half bereft,
to press electric-white seedling roots, skinny wires
into the rich, dark sockets of a field’s edge, to try to light
cool lamps of leaves, to banish the creeping dread
that even planting trees might be as impotent
as fingers kissed to magpies, green forbidden on first-time brides.
Our young sons help us squash the sluggy pearls of grass grubs
that would eat the seedlings in their new-born cribs
but as the news reports that fresh forest fires blacken
the planet’s treasure map, one boy asks, in a toneless blank,
‘Why do people even have children?’
The other hugs me, his body’s slim shuttle
shaken with the gravity of the mind’s strain.
‘You shouldn’t have had us, Mum.’
But we had you because we loved the world.
Stern young faces gavel-blunt, their twinned silences
sentence me as yet another militant of double-speak:
In order to show our love for the planet,
we wanted children who could grieve for it.
Emma Neale
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.