Earth, Water, Air, Fire

 

 

 

 

 

Another wriggling form to struggle with for days
and fanny up an epic theme in thirty lines,
my life! So life it is, Creation through to graves,

for what that’s worth: we’ve end times and withered vines
ahead. Who trod the grapes of wrath’ll have few to squash,
their gelt-grab land-snatch flung to dust, while covert whines

from suited overlords and sharks under the tosh
and lies will dribble on throughout each ghosted land,
lost whispers in a wind that whips the world. Gosh,

Isaiah had the right of it! So has the prophet band
scrying fire across crisp woods, but blanked, ignored,
until the burned earth is deemed out-of-hand.

Out-of...? Only when the ghouls up top were floored
by hail as big as their balls and hammered heads were split
did they admit that ‘something’ needed ‘doing,’ then stored

up more muck in watered words that wobbled on, unfit
to stem tsunamic seas drowning half of humanity
on frantic shores; the last half’ll fall to the Pit

via scorch and blast and choke. We’ll suffer more inanity
before all’s done and all are sifted fine as silt
across the martyred world; it’s much too late for sanity. 

We’ll be left to weep and fail at the globe’s tilt,
its magnet lurching as its crust upheaves to drop
where most life’s out, where ruins carry our death-guilt.

We were warned. Our Jeremiahs called out, “Stop!”
for fifty years, “Block the greed; you mow what you sow.”
Unheeding, civilisation’s due to bottom its top.

No pretty form will temper Creation’s end; the blow
will leave us gone, no life here to cry out, “Woe!"