Do we romanticise the natural world because we know it is dying?
Should we feel guilty that we take the position of appreciator and destroyer of it?
This poem was written in Northern Tanzania, in the Serengeti. It aims to pose questions about the finality of nature through appreciation of it's beauty.
Written while staying at a campsite in the of the national park, there was nothing to distract you from what you saw.
Sun set falls
behind walls,
of shadow.
Pick a plum
aura, or
her daughter.
let it fall
on the camp.
The end
of a day,
one more
memory.
Her caress,
was like the way the sun
strokes the spine of the spinning world
as it sets.
It lies in front of his,
the bush,
all sparse and mocking.
Speckled by crackling creases
of surrendering light,
biding you a good night.
My eyes fall down,
to the reclining lights strands,
and the whole image collapses
into a grain
of sand.
Would Wordsworth's words
have been so beautiful had he known
an hourglass rested on the mantle
under his favourite landscape.
My eyes fall up
and Northern Tanzania
re open s its self.
Meagre hills of cheap sand
threaten my ultimate
homo sapien perspective,
that so often masquerades as didactic.
Tree's do not move,
idle, in their battle against
the fury of the sun.
Pack mules trail through this prehistoric picture,
kicking up prisms of dust
which spin themselves silly.
Tufts of
grass
are the
last
vestiges
on a bald man's
scalp.
My eyes are drawn
back to the camp,
reeled in,
by the fire's floating body.
It burns away it's burden
and the smoke calls me to dinner.
But not before,
Wordsworth's hourglass, I tilt,
to the side where no sand can move.
I will bathe in the ignorance
that this image will stay
for many another moon.
