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The Beginning
God himself
having that day planted a garden
walked through it at evening and knew
that Eden was not nearly complex enough.
And he said:
Let species swarm like solutes in a colloid.
Let there be ten thousand species of plankton
and to eat them a thousand zooplankton.
Let there be ten phyla of siphoning animals,
one phylum of finned vertebrates, from
white-tipped reef shark to long-beaked coralfish,
and to each his proper niche,
and ---no Raphael, I'm not quite finished yet ---
you can add seals and sea-turtles & cone-shells & penguins
(if they care) and all the good seabirds your team can devise ---
oh yes, and I nearly forgot it, I want a special place
for the crabs! And now for parasites to keep
the whole system in balance. . .
. . . In conclusion, I want, he said
ten thousand mixed chains of predation ---
none of your simple rabbit and coyote stuff!
This ocean shall have many mouths, many palates,
many means of ingestion. I want
a hundred ways of death, three thousand regenerations ---
all in technicolor naturally. And oh yes, I nearly forgot,
we can use Eden again for the small coral cay in the center.
So now Raphael, if you please,
just draw out and marshal these species,
and we'll plant them all out in a twelve-hectare patch.
So for five and a half days God labored
and on the seventh he donned mask and snorkel
and a pair of bright yellow flippers.
And, later, the host all peered wistfully down
through the high safety fence around Heaven
and saw God with his favorites finning slowly over the coral
in the eternal shape of a grey nurse shark,
and they saw that it was very good indeed.
Reef
High by the long island's side
the rubble banks swim in the evening light
death-grey and bleached white, speckled together.
The Wind sings over the coelenterate dead
the hollow-gutted stone-sheath-dwellers
the lace-masons, the spicule shapers
the island-makers.
A Queenslander remembers the twentieth century
I dream of leviathan buttresses
church-high and marble-smooth,
roots large as trunks, that trailed
over 50 metres of uneven ground
to hold whole slopes together.
I think of a patch like a cathedral floor
where I sawed all day in the cool,
never saw the sun; and we walked half an hour
to find two trees the same a world
where you worshipped what you killed
not doubting it would rise again.
You could pull on ropes of knotted wood,
telegraph a message through stiff cords
to the flowering tree-tops out of sight, and set
the sleepy fruit-bats fluttering.
On the high-rise sand flats where my son lives now
the mangrove's red walking-roots
poked out and held the shifting silt.
I remember the mother-tree floating
on its spreading stalk of roots
like a cloud over its shadow
and a sun-bird nesting in my porch.
You could let your mind go in those days
out on physical things,
on just what was.
Well, I watched a bloodwood flower in my garden,
dreaming of forests gone to floorboards;
and no glider or songbird came
to its nectar. I remember a mountain
once, wild with the white of its flowers.
Afterwards
I did what I could, but somehow it all seems
like I was turning a steering wheel
on the back end of a bus.
Survival of the fitters
We'll fit forty billion on this globe
or bust, they said.
And did.
More of Mark OConnors poetry is at http://www.australianpoet.com/
This article appears as part of openDemocracys online debate on the politics of climate change. The debate was developed in partnership with the British Council as part of their ZeroCarbonCity initiative - a two year global campaign to raise awareness and stimulate debate around the challenges of climate change.
