What is war?

what is war

what is the environment

when they blow up the city centre

is that an effect on the environment

do humans count as part of the environment

we are the storm

we are the tsunami

we are the flood

we are the wildfire

I have been to Hiroshima

it's a beautiful city

I have been to Warsaw

it's been rebuilt too

both to say

we will not be a historic ruin

like Bothwell Castle or Melrose Abbey

I have walked in places where the remnants of the Caledonian Forest remain

I remain to be convinced that we matter on this planet

but we are matter on this planet

and our wars

from a row in the living room

and fireworks exploding on 5th November.

to the mud-wrecked fields of France and Belgium in 1916

(of course there was no war further east as those countries didn't matter)

our wars, our glorious wars

the heroes named in memorials.

How many horses, cattle, sheep, badgers, foxes, hedgehogs

blown up in these wars

unmentioned in dispatches

though they were of course dispatched

collateral damage.

who counts among the dead?

what matters?

where are we going?

Dad's birthplace

There were twenty-five or more farms here

wee farms filled with orchards, berries, hazel trees,

veg, grain

cows sheep pigs

horses

and semi-wild cats

Wolves howled in the distance at night

in western Ukraine when it was part of Poland

though the animals weren't to know that

after the deportations

then the massacre of those who weren't deported

they burned down all the houses

chopped down all the trees

hungrily ate all the animals

and when the communists formally took ownership

of the land

they turned it all into one giant grain field

it was hard to imagine it as it once was

when my cousin and I visited it

before the war in Ukraine,

easier to imagine the deportation and massacres

as they are being re-enacted on film in the news

in our own time.

I am particularly pleased that my dad and his two sisters

died before the current invasion.

War on Nature

 There's a new housing estate being built nearby

between Hamilton and Strathaven

not far from the one that was built last year,

both built on fields that once formally housed sheep and cows

and, informally mice and foxes and badgers and all sorts of birds.

They come now to our back garden

pushed from their centuries-old homes

our back garden, beside our house

that was built thirty years ago

on a bing that was cleared

to make way for houses

after a century of coal mining

on what was once fields

where mice and foxes and badgers and all sorts of birds

once had their home.

war is what you conceive it to be.

Direction

Am I tomorrow already today?

Am I forever, there's no way to say?

Even the future's not always the way

So should I look forward to yesterday?

I am Friday

I am Friday

unperturbed by the days of the week

I am last day

working hard to end with ease

slipping into slipper eves

ready for existence slow

ready for the final no.

Eons

sometimes it takes eons

to experience a moment

Reborn

I am opening up again

after a time away

a time away from time and place

a time away where dark worlds enclose around you

with a heartache that knows no rules or boundaries

I am stepping foot back in the realm

that crumbled me into ashes and dust

dust and ashes

fireless brimstone

spent existence

I am reborn

me

but me?

do I have to find out again

who I am

or who I might become?