On the Morning of
Christmas Day it’s mild
across our ungrazed field
whose thorns and clay have yet to know a freeze.
The clouds in the east proclaim
how every wise man’s dream
of frost fair, snow and angel, is old news.
Nature, abandoned at the Pole,
feels something cracking behind her icy veil.
From that crazed mouth
a surge of blushing truth
rushes to swell the tide in our affairs,
our coal, our oil, our gas.
We sing of joy and peace
in sun and wind as each new breaker rears.
Too late the call from Greta’s green:
tooth and claw are tearing the ceremonial groyne.
You wish upon a star.
Meanwhile, behind you there
the planet’s jilted ghost wreaks her revenge:
Nature’s pantomime.
If some climatic scrim
dropped a marsh or fen, would that be change?
Still they’d stand, those ancient flats.
It’s when the next field or the one above it floods
that’s never flooded, swells
from unknown wells and spills
across your patio, the singing stops.
Silently you’ll watch
what just came in the porch
and climbs your stairs. Then Mrs Noah hopes
you have a happy Christmas, the news
crackles its last good laugh and the power goes.