Paradise Lust: Trail Blazing (Book 2 Part 4)
Nightrealm scorns surprise of lights
out when lights are up at Hinkley Point
and cooling reactor ‘A’ nuzzles up
to rip-roarin’ reactor ‘B’ (local legends
say, lured by sirens?) with reactor
‘C’ getting legs and outpacing protesters:
I saw a wheatbelt parrot (O sacred 28)
stuffed and cased in a gallery, a stately
national trust accountancy lest we-they-all
forget, eyes as bright or dull as rapiers,
touring children elide their metaphors
and straying on weekends are encouraged
to visit to get a season pass to know thy selves,
to latch onto work sheets and blaze nature’s trail,
pick out the birdlife habilitating the Bristol
Channel’s flank (‘8 different wildlife habitats’!)
with Marbled Whites blown out to sea,
brilliant as the keyboard, the viewing screen,
memory, lifeblood, entertainment,
to power what visioning flat screen despair,
blazing fire, light as whispering wind
on a gloriously mild, sunny day (hey hey)
playing the quasis and demis of insurrection,
confounding the pure light of windfarms
with their prospective flying blades (watch out,
the nuclearists warn, they can really put a spoke
in your wheel!): repulse and exasperate,
aspirate much safer incorruptible aura
of polluted throne and ethereal mound;
so say all of us carving our way through
backroads and backtowns, roundabout
eternities of white horses and Tescoes,
to carve a path equidistant, to never go
inside say fifty miles (briefly) or a hundred
miles long-term (our half-lives being
indeterminate of mischief and inescapable
fire) of the fiery furnaces, past incapable stains
and victorious in fossil fuel expeditionary
despair. To be repulsed by Aldermaston,
weapons to meet all his mustered rage,
an age of hegemonising gravespace,
what waste we store to hedge those bets
(granite beneath the vegetation),
to make our way through ancestry
and Tracy’s family farm still bearing up
and bearing name, a few clicks from Hinkley:
assassinate eternity, perish by expansion,
to gather in the wide womb of foe and motion
and will: all tidal in the buoyancy, the keel
to find its resting place, held down in tension
to be swallowed by returning waters,
and the click click of gears changing,
quickly past, parsed in recirculating air
as if it’s a cure for pain and ideas.
John Kinsella