Widening Gyre

Whatever rough beast we had expected, it turned out
To be a shadow, as if it were our own reflection
In a sliver of glass, a chromed plastic bead or the sea
Beneath, throwing back our faces in the oily swell.

The waves, whispering, said, you did this to us.

Above, seabirds reeled through dirty cloud, turning

And turning like vultures, for we were the destroyers;

Leviathan and all the Krakens of the deep,

Rose out of the dark, disheveled tides to rebuke us…

…the many-headed beast, whose scrapings filled

The grey hollows of the sea: our leftover, useless things,

The poisons of our dreary hearts, curdled medicines,
Chemical residues and waste, discarded and flushed away.

The waves, weeping, said, we too are drowning.

What we made was always broken; although we believed
It should last forever, perpetuity, we discovered, was too long
And everything we thought indestructible was already
Crumbling into the sand grains of geology.

Ancient edifices, monuments to our greatness,
Now stand in worn judgment: the eyes of the sphinx,
Grim, beaked heads carved in jungles, ruined temples
Where blood-pacified gods languish, long abandoned;

And here in the oceans of the last wilderness we find
The remains of filth congealed, the litter of city streets,
Shredded rubber, corroded metallic things, wreckage,
All the tired wrappings of civilization, with seething oil,
Caustic fumes and tepid acid rain dissolving everything,
Eroding the faces of stone to death-masks;

     A terrible litmus stains the green earth brown.

Birds of prey wheel, like falcons, deaf to instruction,
Patient only for whatever flesh we leave behind,
They soar over our careless waste, our whirlpool of rubbish
Where the plastic gyres build our hydrocarbon headstones.

The waves, in sorrow, are saying, there is no more time. 

Massed in office rooms, the factory-fodder boys and girls,
The humble and the holy, are fallen to their knees as if
Jesus was come again or, if not He, some other prophet,
Some other godhead on a crimson tide loosed upon the earth.

But this tumbling world has no spirit left to squander;
It has been worn down to nothing and will not come again.
To name it now is merely to put a name to human folly,
Which is plain enough to see and the prostrate ones know it,
Secretly, they know, all their gods have forsaken them.

The waves, crashing, repeat, we will clean your bones.

© BH, 2017

---

It was Blue Planet II, as if I needed reminding. First you’re shown all the amazing wonders of the deep, life’s incredible capacity to flourish, then the sucker punch.

Of course, we are the suckers, but the punch was not unexpected, and we’re suckers because we are doing it to ourselves. It’s been fifty years and counting since one of my schoolboy pals coined the phrase ‘plastocrap’ because of the dismembered dollies arms and legs washing up on the beaches along with oil cans, Domestos bottles and the like.

So it goes; half a century gone and nobody’s any the wiser. Well, there’s never been money in wisdom, it seems.

So, being astounded at the staggering myopia of our species, I had to try to describe where it has brought us. What’s that? Two generations? And we’ve frankly done bugger all about it. We keep on making it worse, meanwhile progress grinds on. We’re just rearranging deck-chairs on the Titanic.

What came to mind was Yeats - The Second Coming, partly reimagined through the prism of Joni Mitchell’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I took it on from there.