DISORIENTATION - a fable for our times

With a element of sci-fi this short narrative poem takes an oblique look at our strange planetary predicament. How do city-dwellers learn either contempt for, or become immune to, the call of the natural world? Why do we become so detached from it? Why do so many of us come to regard it as an unlimited resource to be subjected to the corporate will or to be desecrated in the lust for profit? And what does it take to come to a collective, yet secular epiphany?

With Tonio steering our borrowed capsule
we had fled the authorised thoroughfares.
Not daring to pause then, even for an instant,
we gazed about ourselves in wonder.

For here were pre-historic mountains,
Sublime landscapes, vast lakes and quiet valleys.
Woolly beasts scattered over the gentle slopes
seemed nits clinging to the pelts of beached Leviathans.

Bitter traces of urban air still clung
to our rank tunics, fear-induced
secretions still clogged our body pores.
We threw our ventilators open, wide as could be!

Then drank deeply of this majestic wilderness.
Over the folds and gullies, the steeps
and escarpments, wafted by an alien Sun,
plumes of vapour, glowed and deepened hue:

We fugitives were simply forced to stare in awe,
to unclench our brows and capitulate
to this personal and renewing disorientation.
The gradations of mauve and pink; dun and ochre;

The tints of lavender and rose unmanned us quite:
delivered the two of us, miraculously, to a point
of raw newness. The pell-mell route we had run,
constantly fearful of discovery, arrest, had faded.

We had dropped, without preconception,
into these astonishing, vibrant valleys: it was our prize
and our curse. For sooner rather than later, we had,
by Time's rod and its litany of trysts and promises

To leave this place and to return to our thralldom:
to constant surveillance; the detested militia winding
the savage clock of a doomed Metropolis.
But now Tonio and I were now ` Disorientates'.

We were pregnant. We were the lost cosmonauts
carrying contraband seed; memory seed;
promise seed: that with each new-breath
would open to another order of understanding.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• Desecration of nature
• Live poetry
• The Natural World
• Contraband seed
• Salvation
• Alienating Nature.

[TheCatalinalira]

Fantastic video and poem! Thank you Fred!

Best wishes, Catalina

[Caspar33]

@TheCatalinalira Many thanks and very best to you too!

[Frits1416]

very inspiring

[Caspar33]

@Frits1416 Thanmks very much Frits - kind of you to say.

[MrPamppers]

This is great! Thanks!

[Caspar33]

@MrPamppers Thanks Mr.P. Have you run out of matches yet?

[MrPamppers]

@Caspar33 Not yet! Still got couple box! :-)

[Caspar33]

@Poemsapennyeach Thanks very much K.

[Poemsapennyeach]

Monumental....!

[Idlinfarm]

Added to favorites.