Hold the moon carefully,
it’s very fragile
so easily broken
by the human touch
just like the earth was broken,
just like the earth is broken
by that same touch.
Perhaps the world ends here
its tears falling like autumn leaves
weeping
to its end
with a whimper.
First published in Brave and Restless November 29, 2021
What would you like for Christmas?
It’s a problem to decide
what to buy for the one who has everything!
There’s a birthday coming up,
what would you like?
It’s a problem to decide
what to buy for the one who has everything!
But now even our special things
are taking us over
growing like triffids
and suffocating us
spewing from our homes,
first to fill plastic bags
and then the land,
the seas,
the air
we breathe.
Too many things.
It’s all too much.
First published in Oddball, December 22, 2021
Looking back to 1969 the words seem prophetic
“He’s got a plastic heart, plastic teeth and toes,
plastic knees and a perfect plastic nose.
He’s got plastic lips that hide his plastic teeth and gums”..
so sang the Kinks then about their plastic man.
Now in the twenty-first century it seems he’s here
as plastics ingested from our food,
and inhaled in from the air we breath
are becoming part of our bodies,
part of ourselves
to be inherited
by our children.
We’ve filled every hole in the ground
with our plastic waste, our plastic excesses
and soon the sea will be transformed into plastic land
Now we re-cycle it by the shipload from rich places to poor,
to places where the people don’t matter,
where “plastic man don’t feel no pain”.
There we dump it on the newly plasticised people
in the plastic land we’ve created for them.
First published in Topical Poetry, January 16, 2022
Lynn White lives in north Wales. Her work is influenced by issues of social justice and events, places and people she has known or imagined. She is especially interested in exploring the boundaries of dream, fantasy and reality. She was shortlisted in the Theatre Cloud ‘War Poetry for Today’ competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and a Rhysling Award. Find Lynn at: https://lynnwhitepoetry.blogspot.com and https://www.facebook.com/Lynn-White-Poetry-1603675983213077/
