Nature
I saw my first swallows of the summer this morning,
barrel rolling across the moors above the village.
It’s fighter jet terrain, but we’ll say
no more of that. Curlews and peewits
nest up there, where the hares run.
The daffodils are on the turn, but celandines will colour
the lanes until the bluebells flower. Every day new lambs
appear, curious and hopeful and full of life. My
dreams are interrupted by the agonies of cows
in calf. It’s only natural.
We’ll slaughter those lambs. The calves will go
the same way. You could make an argument for it,
I suppose, shrug your shoulders and turn
your back. ‘It’s nature,’ you might say,
‘it’s what we have to do to live.’
Come August, we’ll slaughter
pheasants and grouse and other gorgeous and unlucky birds,
not for food mind, just plain old fun; but
this Easter, we’ll dole out extra vouchers
to the kids on free school dinners. The lines at the
food banks grow longer with the days as the
lights are turned off and warmth becomes a luxury
we can’t afford. It’s what we have to do to live.
I saw unseeable things on the news this morning, things
which must not go unspoken. People like us, with families like ours, bombed out
of house and home. Obliterated. Scorched. Flayed.
What must it be like to be unable to find a
single piece of your dead child? Neither a
bootie nor a mitten to lay at the foot of a wooden cross
in front of an empty grave.
I saw unseeable things on the news last year
and the one before, in Yemen, in Syria and
too many other places to name or even
remember. But we have to live, don’t we?
We have to find a way to carry on. Those
people doing the bombing? For a fee, we’ll educate
their kids, no questions asked, while so many
of ours rely upon those vouchers while we debate
absolute and relative poverty. We let them use
our cities as investment portfolios while those same
kids live in clouds of black mould and play on streets
filthy with fumes from the petrochemicals
we say we can’t do without.
I should draw comfort from the blackbird singing
outside my window, but I can’t stop thinking about
the cruelties we inflict on our neighbours. How are we
supposed to take pleasure in the small stuff when
the big stuff is so utterly overwhelming?
How can we live when we can’t stop killing?