All the World Was Broken [blank verse version] 4th October - World Animal Day Light and more light: the first of days began. To soar on weightless wings of air, God made Fair barbary doves and cocksure ravens, And mighty condors wheeling through the sky. For broad grass prairies he made wild sheep there, And bison strong of shoulder, white-tailed deer. For forests too he fashioned eucalypts And firs still green with dark and purple cones. He measured out the oceans and decree

Uncommon One in the garden of statutes where rules multiply like weeds & stones lie about like scruples every step is a misstep in misadventure my ways are not steadfast nor my path clear fallen fruits ripen towards a crisis break a snail underfoot & the roses shiver disaster crush a flower with your heel & the frogs croak catastrophe offend the sun with a dismal glance & the heron broods at the water’s edge disturb a duck egg in the thick grass & the elms grow misty all

All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew. Wild sheep chewed grass; deer And bison chewed too. On a slanted hillside white mountain goats Enjoyed a lofty view. In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew. And fire-green firs with purple cones, Did too. For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans Wet with green and blue – And oceans for the whale and dolphin too. On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew His

When He Planted in the Earth When He planted in the earth a tree of life, a tree of death (the latter with a curse of woe) did God say that this was good? And when He placed upon the grass the serpent Satan and his crew, did He ever stop to think why the Devil envied God? When Adam spied inside the bower that Eve was naked and alone, Was it Satan, was it God Who put the worm in Adam’s blood? And when God wept and cried some more inside a cloud of smoke and gas, was it then he

Aquarius So, the routes of the city, all its paths, arteries and overflows – the scummy run-offs from sewers and roads – end or start on the muddy banks of the sallow-tree river. Water does what it knows: It coils and uncoils like a gut over decades-old millstone grit, between the crumbling, rumbling jaws of Anglo-Saxon stone; Sneaks and snakes under willow trees; runs past hospitals, factories, back-to-back slums, picking up brand new stories and the gho

Under the World A frog descended eighty-six radical steps to the devil’s loch. There the heron brooded at the water’s edge and the reflection of shapely trees misted in the fly-specked underworld.