Last year, I attended an online poetry workshop hosted by the great poet Lemn Sissay. We were set a task to create a poem with a particular structure beginning with “You’re the”….
It was meant for someone or something we either loved or hated; an expression to them from deep inside the heart.
Here’s mine. Each line represents a shared experience. It was sent to the subject, by the way, and received as well as was hoped. I wanted to save it here, just in case it’s immediately lost into the dust.
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The tree, the lizard, and the lyrebird.
You’re the tree of all our secrets
You’re the glass held to my lips
You’re the panic of the python
You’re the wine she never sips
You’re the golden of the bower
You’re the butterfly on my wrist
You’re the silence of the fireflies
You’re the lizard in the mist
You’re the painting of the dipper
You’re the rosella of my words
You’re the keeper of our mothers
You’re the guardian of their birds
You’re my lyrebird of the shadows
You’re my orchid on the tongues
You’re my wildfires of uncertainty
You’re the red-smoke in my lungs
Hey you, who abandoned me at life’s worst moment; who lied to all of us. Who told me of a love, un-encounterable to most. The path that cut steep down through red soils was lined by light. Tiny stars of wood anemone watched over my eager feet as I moved down through the bluebells having their first conversations with the early bees. All seemed so narrow, a weight, but with an unfurling canopy of shock-green saving me from a complete molten, lead sky.
But at the base, where woods fall literally into the river, the sky came in with a bright summer blue, and I stopped to take a deep breath. Breaths are gold, each one, even on ventilin. The river moved like a sliding plate of silver down the table, pausing by me, almost stationary, to hear an ornicophony of riverbirds, and the faint shriek of peregrine somewhere high above. Remember, you asked me to write a poem.
Everything opened up to me at this place, Capler, and to everything, flowing through my veins and into my lungs and to the lips. This was what I came for. To try to heal.
I’m suffering again, not in your arrogance, in your image fixed into the eye of red-bellied black snake (poor snake), but a realisation that a lifetime of my own difficulty here at my desk, might be a neural difference, an unbidden mindset, unseen and unfelt by all who have tried to help me until now. I don’t like the terminology (this is a symptom too), though I sometimes give too much of my attention, and am hardly inattentive to others. But it only takes a hairline fracture to let the light into pitch black.
The DNA-flow of great grandmothers, grandmothers who died by their own hand, mothers (me), daughters who swim beautifully but who still feel they are drowning ~ I just thought this is what it meant to be a woman. To be let down by men.
Apparently, only a few are weighted by this “attention deficit”. The anxiety that has ripped through all life’s traumas—there have been many, about as many men in our lives—I just thought we were sensitive. Perhaps, that’s just all we are. It’s hard to contemplate another turn of mental anguish ~ I’ve only just come off the pills.
So the path swings left as the river widens into the most exquisite vista to the south, the Wye leaning into a high slope of woods, carving the opposite bank where thick Herefordshire farmland sits heavy. There’s a grandmother over there, with her granddaughter, and they are throwing pebbles in the stream. Bredwardine memories stop me still and then empty me.
Butterflies filled me up ~ at least six species; little flighty wings got my attention. I sat among them for a moment, down in the undergrowth, smiling with them. How do you tell a butterfly she is beautiful? Then the path sunk into the bedrock cascading in steps to where the salmon try to run old Ballingham, where the proto indo european rip of riparian—that deep climatic tear—is plain for all to see. More butterflies lay prone on the rock, soaking in the heat. I felt lost there, truly lost in that most profound, good sense.
When I came to my other senses, where dream-brain switches into task-brain (as I am now told), I followed a bee into a wide holloway, pushing up into the steeps under Capler Hill Fort, and into a vast auditorium that would have blown your mind.
Ravens sounded their wings in circles above me (put that sound in my pocket and save it for later). Giant red-tailed bumblebee queens looked like tiny ants as they rustled their buzz under dry, tongued ferns. All the passerines from all over the Earth were here it seemed, super-high among the quarry-top trees. One oak lay crashed down at the bottom of the cliff, fallen from the topsoil that looked so thin at the top. Another big tree that looked small because of the scale dangled precariously, its roots like tentacles feeling the air. All life is so reliant on that thinness.
Then, to hear a slow-rising noise, the shallowest anthrophony of cessna above, of brightly coloured canoe-shouters in the channel, and a sit-on-lawnmower droning slowly towards me. Here, at this place! I could hardly contain my anger. I talked to him later when I’d cooled down, about grass clippings and river ecology—they don’t mix—and he talked to me about keeping things tidy for the tourists, and the fly-fishing licenses; saving the kids from being stung by nettles (I laughed out loud); saving Earth from the scourge of balsam. And litter, to be fair. Even a Ford Capri. And I thanked him for that.
I walked back alongside his engine, and we stopped to listen to the noisy peregrines eyeing two-day old ducklings swimming the big, scary river, in little flurries.
The man told me the quarry I’d found may have been the source of the red sandstone that is now Hereford Cathedral. A hole in a hill the size of nine hundred years. These peregrines live there now, perched on the quarry ledges. Peregrines also hunt their quarry around the Cathedral tower.
I think I found a feather of a female the other day near the remains of a dead pigeon. It’s pinned to my notice board for me to admire the inward beauty of her. Like a shock.
Then one flew right over me casting avumbra. And that was the healing moment of the day. The silence of avumbra. I came home wanting, by the habit of four years, to tell the image of me in the mirror ~ you. I wanted to tell the other one too, the earliest bud of cherry blossom, but he’s just told me he found someone else, before the flowers have even fallen to the ground.
Spring has sprung and, locally, the human capacity to create even more noise than usual is in full swing.
Lately, I have recorded on my phone a plague of noises generated by people and their loud, intrusive tools, be it an iPod and speakers aboard a stand-up-paddleboard floating down the Wye, leaf blowers, lawnmowers, and mulchers sounding their destructiveness and scaring all the birds from the trees and fish from their shaded retreats under the riverbanks, or even the abominable racket made at the local recycling yard next door to a so-called off-set ecological site at the new Skylon Park, Rotherwas Industrial Estate, Hereford (see below).
I know other humans have found it a profound nuisance, more, wholly detrimental to their overall wellbeing.
Whether these noises are short, sharp and ugly, or long drawn-out oppressions, like traffic noise in cities, they will be creating acute or chronic pain and distress in proximate interconnected communities, human and teresapien.
Modes of transport are some of the worst culprits, air, land, and sea. But music can be intrusive too, played loudly or inappropriately in nature, as well as the more obvious terrestrial building and landscaping noises that are created at every moment, in daylight at least. Industrial farmers and foresters are by no means innocent bystanders!
And the internal combustion engine at sea and on navigable rivers has wreaked havoc in the form of “noise pollution” on aquatic wildlife.
We know humans and some animals may attempt to adapt. Think of the louder birdsong recorded in urban areas, or cetaceans and their prey moving away from shipping lanes or active military zones due to the impact on their sonar senses, but at what ecological cost? Mass strandings are real and incredibly harmful.
The pain is both individual and collective. At global scale, it is nothing short of an evolutionary force, and not for the good. It’s time to count Anthrophonalgia as a key manifestation of the ongoing Sixth Extinction Event, the worst of which will be an awful silence, for sure.
~~~
Anthropophony – noise emanating from humans and their tools (Drs. Stuart Gage and Bernie Krause) often shortened to Anthrophony.
Algia – general medical suffix for pain.
~~~
This particular pain and distress is not limited to the physical, but also the emotional, mental, and spiritual. We know that such distress can lead to the lowering of immunity, and other perturbations such as anger and rage that can lead to violence instigated upon others.
We talk so frequently about noise pollution, but very little is done about it. Perhaps naming the pain and distress it causes might just help in the resistance against it.
Anthrophonalgia – pain and distress caused by human noise, including vibrations, either naturally or by the tools humans use.
I’ve suffered myself, as have countless humans and nearly all interconnected species within our one biosphere. Let it end, for goodness sake, now.
Breaking the atmosphere: This is literally what rockets are designed to do. To break free from Earth’s immediate gravity, to escape from our atmosphere and into the beyond whilst stealing supplies, all without Earthly consent.
The ultimate dying consumer is one that devours the systems it relies upon. These men (the gatekeepers are white men), are raping the atmosphere, creating a hellsphere most religions could never have imagined.
These people represent a capitalist industry that pollutes the stratosphere with green house gases everytime there's a launch (people or supplies). https://t.co/wWWat2JhvX
The arguments for scientific advancement pale compared to the scientific argument to STOP fucking up our atmosphere, STOP creating a hellsphere of space junk, and concentrate on solving inequity and preventing extinction of life down here in Earth's biosphere.
The penis-shaped rockets and their gunk literally penetrate a pristine life-protecting and nurturing space around Earth without consent. If that isn't the definition of rape…
The energy and mind-time dedicated to space exploration (pollution of the stratosphere and near Earth space), has lost all sense of true scientific advancement for ALL life. The Anthropocentrism, the Whitemanthropocentrism (look at the gatekeepers) is stomach-wrenching.
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