Category: Natural World

Creative Writing, Current Affairs, Natural World

A Lamentation, of course

annalieseaman
Photo by Snapwire on Pexels.com

The Starling is at

His loudest today, crying

Springlings to the wind.

I think of freedom

And know it as a mental

State – freedom of thought.

I cry inside for

Ukraine: neighboured by such brute

Aggressors who pit –

Metal against flesh

For the sake of territory/

Power/stark control.

Damn these hate-humans

Who are so mired in dark want

They can’t see the stars!

What a waste of this

Existence: furiously

Pumping blood from veins.

All consciousness must

Now reel back from the darkness

Where brokers whisper –

Awful threats against

All life; chant ‘nuclear’ at

Frightened nations and –

Laugh at our despair.

And yet we are not the ones

Whose homes are bombed, we –

Sleep soundly – waking

To horrors visited far –

Off – we feel safe here –

Where starling and red

Robin cry all to these clear

Blue skies, but really –

We are no more safe

Than any sentient life

On this one planet –

While those among us

Harbour toxic death by whim

As false deterrent.

What world this that makes

One species too powerful

For reason; we fail –

Even as half of

Us prop up trees with our backs

So we can all breathe.

Creative Writing, Family, Natural World

Friston Forest

annalieseaman

Winter branches creak over wild primrose,

new-blossomed from the land.

The pond, full-green, sits tranquil.

Daffodils burst in clumps,

Ivy-decked ground softly crunches,

Twigs snap.

Dens stand here, logs stacked against

tumbled branches –

a village of stick-stacked huts,

Pandemic won’t stop play.

Children’s laughter echoes through spindly trees –

acacia, birch and oak and all their sapling babes.

A well-hung swing glides over moss and fern,

and stump of tree and root.

We picnic round a ring of logs,

surrounding an imaginary fire.

Rooks, communing, caw and swoop

around their tall-branched rookeries.

Blackbird and magpie look on.

Here and there: traces of rabbits,

in earth-uprooted, scat-scattered.

Down we trek through slopes littered

with Autumn’s chestnut leaves,

still crisp underfoot.

Whip-thin, spindly branches, tipped with buds,

wait to sprout.

Just a day since the Equinox

balanced out the days –

and nights,

and already Spring is

trumpeting in its season;

proclaiming its dominion

over barren earth

and the dregs of decay.

Life trembles here, on

the edge of becoming.

The forest, sleepy from its

frigid slumber –

emerges tentatively,

listening to the call

of Persephone’s returning song:

Come blossom, bloom and bud;

Come flower, frond and fern!

Awaken and delight

for the world is turning

and your time is nigh.

Creative Writing, History, Natural World, Research

Huxley and Darwin meet Mary Anning’s Ghost

annalieseaman

Huxley said to Darwin: see hear, can you believe it?

Darwin answered soundly, of course I can conceive it.

We men are not as masterful as we would like to be,

For life must claim all ancestry from some primordial sea.

That puts us on a par with beasts of sea and land and sky,

Not put in some old Eden by a God who rules on high.

We’re grown from cells and elements that fell from outer space,

We cannot claim that we are some superior human race.

I hear you, man. You speak as me, our work we can compare,

For I’ve been travelling southwards to far island countries where –

The creatures trapped on land have changed – evolved quite on their own,

Adapted to the trees and beasts their habitats have grown.

I hear you sir, for I have seen that chalk is formed of creatures

That fell through ancient salted seas some time in the Cretaceous.

The land we walk upon is just a small part of the cycle

Of birth and death and changing years, it’s really quite delightful.

We see through veils of gross untruths to search for something clearer,

And find ourselves enchanted by the mysteries we see here.

What will they say, the men on high, who rule with blinkered eyes,

When we tell them they’re descended from a line of chimpanzees?

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

PART TWO

Excuse me gents, says Anning, from her grave out in the west,

You’ve forgotten half the members of this race you’ve just discussed.

I was the first to find Jurassic fossils of the sea,

Though they said I could not join the club of men’s Geology.

You see, your evolution has no place at all unless

You remember whence a child came before it milked the breast

So when you’re talking of the greatest wonders of natural science,

Prepare to hear the women’s share, or else meet pure defiance.

From daughter, wife, and mother from sister, niece, and aunt,

Don’t act like you can’t hear us – we won’t give you the chance.

You must change this narrative, that claims a man alone can know

What happened in the predawn years when man – and woman – had not grown.

We’ll be doctors soon and scientists of palaeontology

And we’ll be searching for the answers in the beds below the sea.

So yes we’re listening out for knowledge and the wisdom born of man

But we’re listening too to knowledge and the wisdom born of womb.

  • Mary Anning’s Ichthyosaur Discovery

Image References:

Charles Darwin’s Theory By Unknown author – Originally published in The Hornet magazine; this image is available on University College London Digital Collections (18886), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23436

Drawing of the skull of Temnodontosaurus (originally Ichthyosaurus) platyodon found by Joseph and Mary Anning, 1814, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 1814, Everard Home (1756-1832)

Creative Writing, Natural World

Rewilding

annalieseaman

Working on reclaiming the wild spaces,

Rewilding these humanly-altered places,

which remind us of our human wildness

And how we remain wild on the inside.

When the world wants to rewild the altered places

And return them to their wild nature,

We think we have to do something –

But we rewild by leaving the wild well alone.

Pasture turns to thicket when the sheep have gone

Thicket seeds forests when the people leave

Nature rewilds itself