Breath (a Paean, to Seagrass)

Carbon, bonded left and right
To Oxygen,
Or standing, pyramidical,
With Hydrogen in fours
Will kill us all.

Near forty billion tons of it
Pumped out each year across the Globe
From fossil fuel combustion
And the stinking smear of human toil –
Polluting lungs,
Wrapping a world, not ours to spoil,
In warming blankets
Sewn of sulphurous smoke

Sometimes, we justify our vandal violence
Through cases made for urgent need
Sometimes, sheer want is cause enough
To fast propel, unthinkingly,
The human tendency to cause
Asphyxiation, and decay

But either way,
We mould, and crank, and forge
Our endless S T U F F
Without restraint. . .

The anthropocentric,
Thoughtless, selfish, code
Calls out imperative
A credo that we must
Above all else:

M A N U F A C T U R E

And thus
Our catastrophic human calling card
Becomes – ambivalent – a litany
Of constant matter made:

Machine Magnetic Resonance
For proton-diagnostic scans;
Defibrillation pads and leads
For village walls, or human hearts;
Cardiopulmonary perfusion pumps
To push, blood-rich, life’s oxygen
To loved, but failing kin –
Whose atria skilled, trained,
and careful surgeon’s hands,
Ablating illness,
Mend

Dynamic monuments
Dancing proud in tensile steel
That change our world for good

Bridge-building feats,
Bright-burnished in their daring spans
of awesome altruistic opulence –
That vault, like cries of human hope,
Against, ingrained, the
Bent we have for strife –
Attempts we make
In alloyed carbon/iron flux
To cross-out age-old pain
And take two febrile,
Fractured, factioned tribes
From some well-known
and age-old enmity
To neighbourhood;
and peace.

Yet also. Stultifying. Crass.
We churn out:

Brand-new but ‘ditto’, mobile phones
When old ones work just fine –
Because the trend is now not then;
A Rubik’s Cube, or fidget-spinning craze –
That moderates our stress, for sure,
But brings in diesel ships from Asian shores
Ton after wrecking, reeking, stifling ton
Of cracked-up petrol waste. . .

Creating microplastic mess
That fish ingest unknowingly
Before we trawl
To gut, and eat
The flaking piscine flesh
We feel is ours to take

Such contradiction, chaos, anarchy
Is summed up well
In Crutzen’s and in Stoermer’s
Short, but all-condemning term:

A N T H R O P O C E N E

A time obscene that’s all too knowing
In its educated foolishness.
A putrid spray of rank, informed abuse
and manufactured greed

A span of years that leads, two-faced,
The stupid end of simian folk: Humanity,
A species all-too knowing in its ignorance,
To spread its sedimentary filth
In carbon and petroleum slurs
That desecrate our only mother
Gaia’s crying corpse

Such straining stain,
(Informed at times by science whored)
See us, bizarrely,
Choking out the lungs of Earth
Whilst educating new, well-funded,
Lab-coat wearing Geeks
Who plot their charts,
and place smart-minded pulse oximeters
upon the dying fingers of our world

So let us stop to pause,
and take a breath
Fall down from lofty heights of human skill
To mud … and earth … to find some calm

Because, against the complex sapiens gnarl
of skill, and need, and useless waste,
Could it in some way be that
Simple SEAGRASS saves us all?

Node, stem, strong root, and basal sheath
These photosynthetic chloroplasts
Could meadow-green
In spreading canopy
of rising shoots
Unfurl themselves to leaves and blades
That breathe, and store the carbon mess we make –
Absorbing silted-stinking human filth
Exhaling Oxygen

Five hundred hectares
Of green lung like this
Once sat round Spurn
Before our century of harm
Confounded it with chemicals,
Disease, and coastal squeeze

Through which depleting time
We slowly and unthinkingly
Dug out the only
Healing roots of chance we had
and stopped, so wilfully,
Our natural water lungs
From filtering
The air we need to breathe,
Sequestering the sabotage

But now, at last,
A terraforming transformation builds
Enacted by the better angels of our hearts
Rewilding Wildlife Trusters
Reseeding Humber and beyond
With fine Zostera marina,
A plant statistically staggering in its skill
A saline grass whose meadows could
In yearly take
Some eighty million tons
of carbon, silt and sludge
Lock-up in blue-root sinks

Stored safe, the squalid splurge,
Our cancer on the world,
Could in this way
Be filtered fast
and placed in meadowed seagrass…
Mangrove … salted marsh…

And in those less than one-tenth part of one percent
of ocean floor
A growing aquine grace
Could store-up naturally
Some ten percent of
All the carbon waste we make
To clean our air
and give us time

To live