Revelations

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-40645745?SThisFB

Such grim revelations must surely
increase as the process we
have started gathers pace.

Mothers, fathers, daughters, sisters,
brothers, grandfathers, sons,
each in their turn born into the light

in the arms of that nurturing landscape
that held them suspended and undisturbed
with their mortal secrets all kept safe

before the climate, our cameras,
the long reach of our media
rudely stripped them bare.

A long lifetime has passed.
We take stock of their remains.
A woman’s shoe, a green glass bottle.

An old-fashioned back-pack,
a part of a body. The ghoul in us
goes searching for the rest.

For them when the angel
came swooping like an eagle
goodbyes were scarcely possible.

Not for them the reaching out
towards the touching of gloved finger tips
or the last, brief locking of iced lips.

Only sheer, steep terror and
a gripping of the guts as the
horror of it all became apparent.

Seconds crawled by
as the earth up-ended and they
played out their slow, soft descent.

Climatologists instruct us
how a rise in global temperatures
is thawing the ice of mountain glaciers.

Our greed lays bare the corpses
of those loved one who died
in a more transparent age.

 

Image from the BBC news story. Click on the link above.

Advertisement