activism

won’t take no more
prevarication
time to go for
provocation
play the hellion
make rebellion
call to action
not reaction
instigation
not frustration
hit the street
cool the heat
make a statement
carbon abatement
put it out there
end the nightmare
bag it can it
save the planet

© BH, 2020

---

With all the brothers and sisters on the streets,of course, the adrenaline runs high. After too many demos in the 70s, too many sit-ins, protests and generally dope-hazed anarcho-syndacalised better-left-than-bereft evenings in some dingy flat up Ashvale at a time when the chipper wasn’t a national treasure and still had some kind of working-class chic, here we go again.

There is a corpuscle in me somewhere that says ‘damn right, do it’ just as another more Presbyterian vessel girns and wheedles, ‘well, not exactly’. Time was when saving the planet was a new idea. Bugger me, that was thirty years gone or more. 

So, what if the great unwashed and their unwashed-but-actually-well-off woke pals want to ruck in the streets, lie down before the tracks of HS2  and another bulldozer’s worth of progress. If my dicky hip allowed, I’d lie there with them; if my creaking joints, now part of my skeletal archaeology, would let me hug a tree, I’d be there. 

But I can only hang my hat on the bandwagon now and shout abuse from the sidelines. It’s the lot of the ageing hippie. Says me, popping another pill - just to stay alive.

First draft posted on FB under the title 'They are XR'.