Modern Times

once, life was simple

you had to find food

pick it or hunt for it.

you went hungry or felt fed.

you slept in the cave or the hut

went to the stream for water

enjoyed the warmth of the sun

and shivered through the wintry months.

your babies died, some survived

same with the mothers.

From time to time the emperor's

or nearest tribal king's men

came round and either killed you

or took your adult sons to war.

Sometimes they came back

often not.

Life was painful, hard

but we still had moments of love, laughter, joy.

and we knew how things were.

We knew how things were.

Now everything is available

though not to all.

to eat you have to have money

and for that you have to work

in the machine

or rely on something called the state

or charity.

The emperors who rule are not like before

where the most gruesome aggressor wore the crown.

Now, in some of our places, we vote for them

though we don't know what we are voting for.

Now we don't try to find food for our families

now we don't know where the food comes from

or how it is made

or what it is made of.

Nor do we know how the country runs

or the technology that makes everything work.

We vote if we still have any sense of hope and trust,

and think we are choosing our decision.

But everything is so complicated

there's no way for anyone except a professor

to really assess the options

and reach a rational conclusion.

And so it is,

eight billion people,

bewildered but unaware that we are bewildered,

cogs in cogs in cogs in cogs

sensing that we are still autonomous beings

but really we are not authentic any more.

True, there are moments, snatches, words, songs, a tale or two

that, offered, brings back a scent of reality amongst the insane clutter

of the megalopolis

which stretches from LA to Tokyo and Oslo to Dunedin

and it is these glimpses of what truly nurtures us

that reminds us of what it once was

to be human.

Pinballed

pinging around like a pinball

in a machine

not of my directing

though of my making

too many conflicting bumpers

accelerating me this way and that

my hands tense on the flippers

but rarely do I get the chance to use them

and sometimes when I try I miss

and the ball goes down the hole

out of the conscious world

then a second later something - me?

pings it back into the game

and it all starts again.

Field

I walked on a field that wasn't there

floated in darkness, breathed thick air

no birds sang, no flowers fair

I walked on a field that wasn't there.

I died in a loch that was dead already

the fish decayed, the rainfall heavy

houses ruined all around

no birds sang, no, not a sound.

I walked on a field I'd walked before

my footprints bloody, my red eyes sore

nature lay ruined all around

no birds sang, no life was found.

No life was found, just you and me

and we are memories of a sea

that once comprised most every thing.

and worst of all, no birds sing.

No birds do sing, no birds do sing

can you hear the grief

no birds do sing.

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?