Carbon Footprints

Battalions in the air, on the ground,
On the sea or under it
Set entire nations ablaze
Until they are nations no longer.

Spies in corners dig and sift,
Extract hidden treasure from the dirt
As if it were some mineral thing
And not the dying embers
Of a fractured world.

Secret people lie in wait to spring their traps,
Rise up in quiet streets, eyes blazing, staring,
To sell us our own self-inflicted wounds.

And a war, so long ignored,
Is raging in turbulent earth.

We have spent insidious generations
Hacking at the soil, uprooting its growth,
Spilling all manner of spoil,
Dividing up the kingdoms
Of ground, rock and water,
Dividing them up,
Weighing them in the balance.

Profit is the name we have for our successes
And loss for all our failures smirking behind.

Not then and not now, have we found
Our own domain to be wanting,
Not least, our claim to it,
Staked on the merest rock or puddle,
But wanting it is and, piece by piece,
It is given up.

We struggle with nature and with ourselves.
We howl about injustice and atrocity,
Set our ranked brigades against them
Send armaments to blast to pieces
Every bad thought, all shades of dissent;
We would bring peace about by shattering it.

The fight itself rips us apart, human from human,
Limb from limb, what we have built, stone from stone:
Futile and useless self destruction, unwitting suicide.

We have no sense of the cost, setting price above value
Greed above altruism. The earth bleeds with our stupidity.

More than anything, as the cities burn
And nothing but scorched earth remains,
We see people flee, in huddled, scrawny bands
And ignore their loss for the profit to be had.

We never pause to question any of it,
So blinded are we by smoke and ruin.

© BH 2015

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So now we’re bombing Syria. So now we’re in Paris at yet another summit discussing climate change. It occurs to me, how many of the great and the good have considered the connection? Just exactly what is the carbon cost of war?

I have to ask. Never mind the fracking and the pipelines, the strip-mined coal, the relentless extraction of fuels for our impossible lives, how much production, waste and sheer going up in smoke is taken up by war? How much of this stuff are we willing to let go, turn a blind eye to, because it’s about warfare, defence of the realm? Hah! Aren’t we threatened by much bigger stuff: the seas rising up, storm and tempest, drought, famine and so on? Of course, we’ll have the same fight over the displaced in flight, over who owns enough of everything to damn the rest. In the end it’s all a hill of beans. Stupid, farty beans. Eat your money then you MFs. Eat jack shit!