Since my wife Sarah tragically died three years ago, poems have been flowing from me like water.
Almost all of them are both an expression of grief but also the ever-renewing hope that it is to be human and alive.
Many of my poems mourn the loss of the natural world, both for its own sake and also as a metaphor for Sarah.
I feel deeply uncomfortable sharing these poems but I do so because I found that so few people were good at dealing with loss and grief around Sarah’s death. I’m sure some of this is about the famous English reserve, but as the ‘grief walker’ Stephen Jenkinson has so insightfully said in his book Die Wise, we have a deep cultural problem with death and grief in developed societies – almost like it is a failure, to be blocked out to the last. We need a new language and ability, permission even, to talk about it.
As I know to my cost, this inability culturally to countenance and talk about death can leave the living with a lot of confusion, silence and inner work to do.
The deathly metaphor of the climate and extinction emergencies, things I have cared about for 35 years and that are now validated increasingly in the mainstream and at the heart of the system (Governor of the Bank of England, departing Prime Minister, the cautious Sir David Attenborough), are more present than ever and yet we still feel half asleep, stuck in a vortex of inaction, fear of breaking out of the conventional, silenced by… what?
Of course, these problems apply as much to me as anyone else, so I am pushing myself to publish my poems as a gesture of naming, courage and leadership.
I hope they help you to reflect, move, ‘leave the straight line’ and act in your life and work.
Bon courage,
Alister
Our own nature
Where are you?
Now as the world dies
A thousand deaths
Acts of inattention
Or greed, brutality
Yes, the urangutan
Shot to clear the way
Her forest an inconvenience
To the palm oil magnates
Greta’s “few people,
Making unimaginable
Amounts of money”
The lion, elephant
Felled for the fat man’s
Entertainment
The Pangolin, or shark’s fin
Slaughtered for soup
Need I go on?
But this is not
Far away…
Not only.
It is also here
Right here
Disappearing under
Our noses
Eaten, poisoned, abandoned
By us
This is our own nature…
And you, me, we
Are standing by.
Are we? Really?
This is the meaning
Of leadership:
To stand
When others shrink away
To speak
When others fall silent
To act
When others, contented
Self satisfied, or pursuing pleasures
They know to be short lived
Sit on their hands.
It is not comfortable
To lead.
You don’t have
All the answers.
And others will look on
Criticise, complain, resist, sneer.
Discomfort is the entry price
For a life of meaning
But you
Are the butterfly
Whose wingbeat can inspire
Another heart to open
A village to change
A thousand people
To leave the straight line
And re-join the great circle
Of our nature
Our own nature
Our own true nature.
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