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.
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 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?
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.
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.
