To The Echelons Of Power

To the echelons of power, wherever you are
It is not too late to turn, please
play a different role
Another world is waiting to manifest

Wont you pacify the grotesque hubris which has you
funding private escape pods
destined for far off planets
What do you have to offer the mystery of space?
Except a profound disconnection with your origin and kin
The unfolding caverns of majesty require an imagination
one that goes beyond your sterile lunges for survival
You vampires of the common wealth
Do not build bunkers out of fear and petrol
Give to regeneration
Stop casting the most vulnerable as fodder
May the word collateral choke in your throats

What remains still extends grace towards you
Still the trees suffocated by indifference give oxygen
and the blessing of a raindrop on your skin is a whisper
Do not only hear a warning of scarcity and acid
In that whisper hear hope too
and turn
Join in and work for regeneration  

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