New Year Poems

Happy New Year, all.

I haven’t been on line so much over the winter. Not much to make one want to be, in many ways.

Anyway, I wrote a couple of poems on New Years Day, one a little more hopeful than the other.

Hope you like them.

One of the plant pots on my balcony, with Alyssum, a small seedling of those tomato-like plants, and some other species like navelwort and Arabidopsis/ rock cress that self-seeded.

            Rewilding Little Lives 

Flowers in my window box this New Years Day

Brought smiles to see flies upon the white petals

Delightfully drawn to pollinate these late blooms

Providing provender in winter and spring seeds.

.

Insight that acts of rewilding can be so easy:

Simply leave a little land for life, and equally

Life will return once we allow it land, thus we

Keep everything alive a little longer by these 

Little acts and actions, ceding some concrete 

So when our concrete recedes life can yet proceed.

.

            Nothing Changes On New Year’s Day

We kiss at midnight and wish

One another the best, that 

The world will rise above our 

Worries with the coming year;

.

Raise our champagne to celebrate

Our survival of the last, then we

Rest in unhurried slumber, until

The bells ring in the faithful for

.

New year’s Service, and we 

Step out to see too the debris,

Finding revellers have left their

Refuse in the most amazing places.

.

Picking up a cracked plastic party

Trumpet, we ponder if we will play

These in the next decades, and stroll

Slowly to our sacred spaces, with 

.

A grim smile, while the sun slants low,

Watching Earth go round just the way 

It spun yesterday, today.

Reducing trash – even though it will all be recycled…

I’ve been feeling a bit guilty lately about the amount of trash I create, after I read recently about the girl, Lauren Singer, who is one of the guests on this radio show about how to live a greener life – one of her blog posts, about not producing any trash for two years. (the photo below is of her fridge…)

Having a daughter who likes yogurts, and the both of us being diabetic, we’re always going to generate plenty of plastic – unless I get a keg installed at home, I’m going to keep buying cans of beer. I can’t calculate how much plastic and metal we put in our recycle chute here.
But I have been buying packaged veggies in the supermarket just because it’s quicker than waiting in the lines for the veggie stalls in the old fashioned market downstairs, which is terrible, since I’m sure the veggies are better for me from the market, and I love the fact that here in Spain these old markets still exist and want to support them.
I have just come back from a trip to said market and went to the stall which sells veggies mostly grown right here in town on a small farm… and they gave my daughter a free strawberry (yeah… they still sell strawberries in December, but they’re from southern Spain, not Chile…) AND they gave me an extra courgette that wasn’t in great shape just to not waste it. I feel great about myself again and will hereafter make the effort – during the week the queue wasn’t even long.

 

Then again, listening to the show, I can see my carbon footprint is huge because I don’t’ live at home any more. I can only hope all my cycling will one day make up for flying home twice a year!

http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/12/11/cop20-united-nations-energy-efficiency