‘To stiff a virus in mid song,’
clinicians say, ‘cannot be wrong.
So by extension it is we
whose work will set the planet free.’

‘No, by best logic it is us
(your ‘we’ is twee but who’s to fuss),’
say engineers, and build a road
as killing field for cat and toad.

‘We make the vehicles, their lamps,
refueling stops, and maintenance camps
so humans can ride roughshod through
the habitat of owl and shrew.’

‘With our aid fools can forests fell,
inverting lines that used to swell
with fair-caught trout. They are no more
now we’ve made nets and heavy bore.’

‘A piece of Heaven with a beach
was not beyond our tankers’ reach.
To those who washed the birds in answer
we sent a friendly warning: cancer.’

‘No, not warn thém. They all will die.
The warning’s for their friends who cry
and for their children left alone:
the world is ours hours to own.’

Clinicians treat the engineers
for nightmare, lower-colon fears,
and for their failing faith that they are right
to hide the stars with manmade light.

These same clinicians, when they quail
at questing for the Holy Grail
of killing other forms of life
go kick a cat or take a wife

or husband as their own advisors
and when that fails, hire advertisers
to put a better spin on things
and blow expensive smoke that rings

the bug-free swamps and empty fields
with figures of fantastic yields
of crops that look superbly neat
and that sport a shelf life you can’t eat.

The advertisers takes the wages
that they are paid to serve as sages
and buy furred robots, shiny cars
and sell us colonising Mars.

Smoke hangs over deep cold waters
fed by tumbling mountain streams.
Bears and otters watch the smokestacks
stain the mist banks. Gaia dreams.

Gaia dreams of when the planet
was a place that species shared.
Gaia struggles with her nightmare
remembering when events had paired

one sort, humans, with the power
to learn how to force their will
on at first a few small moments.
Now they’re monsters growing shrill

in her dreams and in the actual
world that she sees sickening.
Gaia names the man-made monsters:
agriculture, splicing genes,

fashions leaving reason lonely,
cities rising, streets encroaching
everywhere until there’s only
room for humans, rats, and roaches.

Gaia needs man’s inspiration
like a corpse requires new clothes.
She deplores the susurration
of what human beings propose.

‘Bigger, better, obsolescence,’
cries man-built society.
Gaia, half drunk, acquiesced once.
Now she sees finality.

‘Cute when little,’ she describes them.
‘They make garbage of the world.’
She deplores their profit-plagued whirl
that’s left nature injured, curled.

‘Volcanoes I unleash will purge them,’
Gaia hopes. She is too late.
The molten flares can’t be a diadem
restoring what’s been lost to fate.

In a park paved by a president
who like Caligula adored death,
a badger poisoned by his words,
succumbing, cries with its last breath:

‘Gaia, save us, save yourself.
See the solution, pull the plug.’
Squirrels and badgers line the shelf
of creatures killed off. Gaia’s shrug

chokes on itself. She starts and wakes.
She calls the few still listening people.
She tells them what salvation takes.
She knows their faiths require a steeple,

something church-like: she tells stories
painting pictures of redemptions,
of women causing renewed glories.
Gaia and people share pretensions

that it’s not too late to save
what was beauty and in balance.
Armies march. Dictators rave.
Valour reaches to the valence

but no further. Hope expires.
Life itself, the constant wonder,
leaves the lakes and woods and shires.
Even microbes expire under

the weight of waste that’s gone before.
Moon-like, dead Earth gyrates senseless
unaware that once it wore
all the gifts that gods in endlessbouts of generosity gave
to a rock that spins in orbit
of the sun star—now a grave
with no one left to write its obit.