Victims of Power

https://tompburgess.blogspot.com/2019/05/to-echelons-of-power.html

By Tom Burgess and Oliver Bancroft 

Norwegian Voices

http://beacon.by/tom-burgess/norwegian-voices

A writing collaboration and adventure by Harry Swordy and Tom Burgess

Restless

When we came to allocate the fields
Only those trees that fitted into our small horizons stayed
The survivors became natures arbiters
Straddling the newly pastoral and a mythic world now gone
Traces left in gnarled bark and the whisper of leaves
Their lives prolonged by pollarding hand after hand after hand
Somewhere down the line hands were washed
Our connection further strained
Hedgerows no longer tended did not stay tame
Giving themselves in decay to the earth

Making fertile the soil, ground primed

the veterans remain

As wildness begins to reign we concrete over

Then desire a lawn
So buy fertiliser
Ship nourishment in from Russia, the US or Israel
Ever shaping the land
Restlessness the only story

Occupy Plastic

In June Sid Saunders took action against Gloucestershire incinerator and the prevalence of single use plastics by going on hunger strike for 16 days. The protest overlapped with his birthday, I wrote this poem to mark it. Please check out the link https://www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/news/gloucester-news/man-vowed-starve-himself-hunger-1620266

Occupy Plastic

On the day of his birth

Sid pulses with the earth

Beautifully tethered to its worth

Not like that which he resists

A throw away culture still persists

Though in the light of his eyes it dwindles

That which is pulled from the bowels of the earth

To make a cameo appearance in the lives of humans

Then wretched and deformed it clings

to the worlds throat

Squeezing the life out of everything

People like Sid ask us to take note

To join in with our bodies and fertile minds

A natural intermingling for change

Future Hedgerows

Life is now charging down lanes in a personal train

Flanked by ancient monuments where plenty happened pre-parish life  

Oblivious to boundaries huddle    

The secret senate of birds still alive with sex buzz and industrial vigor

Life now throwing fumes in rash assault 

The in between places insecure

Birds dart at my wheels in protest

Ripples of the things race the windshield

Swerving hysterics wave us on down black knife tar

Such fanfare flurry within the bank awakens a Self That Soars

Fly by Hornbeam, Holly, Holm Oak and Hawthorn, race past the H’s

Hazel replaced in the dictionary by futile acts of immortality

Red Backed Shrike a mere mortal that once forgotten can’t be googled

Start with the art word sounds that sing Starling, Wren, Song Thrush

Now the ideas we combine meet around wires grip

Soon a Nut Hatch will be in the palm of a child as they gaze at the embers of another rainbow ended

Pressing at buttons whilst knowing little

The nameless animals have turned it up to compete with the aching birth pangs of the city

They shout a shrill timorous song behind the tweeting of pop sensation X

Now that the butterfly moves too slow for the fast lane the whimsical lunges of the Romantics fade

We need a new urban doggerel that still shivers at words like sunlight, leaves and dew

That sculpts in clutched pirouette with all that is natural and true

Lyrics that dance like crazy with the pouring wonder of this world within worlds

We don’t need to be the climatic pivot of creation only join in

Somehow content in the vast anonymity of slow time

I want to see hedges on sky scrapers

Let us redream the better rows of our ancestors

Redeem rootless prodigal landscapes all the way up

Oh, to bump into a Linnet or two on the way to a conference on the 15^th floor

Those grass-green heroes of older poems could become associate members

Off to a problem-solving meeting met by the chirp whistle of a new day

A bead sprinkle of light animated by bounteous rain drops

Lolling off leaves down glass windowed offices

Everything the right PH, might make us kinder

Like clean air to lungs, might make us bright

For the cartwheeling star that we call Sun

A quickening light, shines beyond this Tender country