Hourglass Sand
POETRY: Cause and consequences, the concertina of time, human failings.
The year is here.
Electric trees
seek pollen from mechanical bees.
The month is here.
On the streets of Mars,
emigrés drive in flying cars.
The week is here.
The last great ape
returns our gaze on videotape.
The day is here.
Children run
indoors, from the eye of a vengeful sun.
The hour is here.
And hope is all
we have to break our bodies’ fall.
This moment rests on the hourglass sand.
The clock’s tick slows, infinity’s spanned.
Caught in history’s dock, I stand
with love,
frail love
cupped close in my hand.
MY IMPOTENCE TO AFFECT CHANGE is the meat of this poem. It’s 2025 and in the relative comfort of southern England – no wash-away floods, no hurricanes or typhoons, no choking smoke of forest fires, an uncrowded coastline that welcomes the inching ocean – I see the distant effects of climate change but I don’t feel them up-close. I react to what’s local. Generations below me will need to cope with the climate’s consequences, and in some mix of politeness and good-behaviour I recycle and buy a hybrid car, but alone I feel powerless to do anything truly meaningful.
This was brought home to me when eco-thinking about not taking a flight to Europe, but then looking at the map of all the aircraft in the air at one time in the US, Europe and east Asia. That map is mad! Defeated and deflated, I booked the Madrid flight anyway. I’m kidding myself that the horizon is not coming towards me.
So I know climate’s a looming problem, I’m sympathetic and careful, but wilfully careless where it suits me. I don‘t feel answerable to the future for my behaviour now and if put in the dock to account for my crimes, I’d have nothing to say. I’m as guilty as everybody else, and everybody else is sailing over the edge of the world, too.
My apathy’s stoked by the feeling that, no matter how stupid, misguided and lazy I am now, I won’t get called out on it. In the future, people who dwell on counterfactuals – “Why didn’t people in 2025 work harder to reduce fossil fuel usage?” – will be seen as daydreamers, not living in the real world. They will be wishing the problem away instead of coping with it. In the same way, right now, we don’t project guilt onto earlier generations who did not standardise nuclear-waste disposal, did not foreground computer literacy in education, did not preserve seed diversity, did not draw national borders that respect native peoples, and numerous other examples of poor choices that built our sub-optimal modern world. Historians will write about it, but ordinary people? Nope.
We are where we are, the future will be where it will be, I will make no difference, and it feels like only emotional life counts in the present. Am I a Buddhist now, my thoughts revolving around internal consciousness, around love? Who I love. What I love. And it’s all self-love, isn’t it?
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Photo: Florian Kriechbaumer, on Pexels
I suspect it’s already affecting everyone, mostly in the form of food prices… our food systems are global and interconnected. Defo know the feeling you’re talking about!