Grass Rules
Sometimes I forget the pervasive need of our culture
To exert control
Over nature
The necessity to squash what is wild
The perverse desire for order
Sometimes I overlook the very “British” obsession
With tidiness
Its self-policing nature
The intrinsic social competitiveness of it all
The well kept
Freshly mown lawn
That symbol of the moral person
The good citizen
With community values
The tidy lawn of the Englishman
That beats his wife
Then whistles
While chop chop chopping that grass
And trimming those edges
And smiling gayly to his neighbours
The well-managed lawn of the social climber
Recently promoted to the middle class
And intent on remaining there
They leave the blossoming vegetable patch
Leave the leaves, flowers and herbs
With uses their grandparents used to know
Leave leave leave that all behind and greedily claim the status-serving sterility
Of the 1-inch-grass.
Human slaves to the real ruling elite
Green blades sitting comfortably on their dearly sprayed
Watered and trimmed thrones
The ecological mirror held to a societal monoculture
Who domesticated whom?
Green Rage Red Hands
Rage green rage
Green grass
Green stained blades
With blood of butterflies and buddleja
Woodlice and lilacs
Unborn stillborn
Still born? I hope
But then where do they grow, live
Suddenly transported from the rich country meadow
To the sterile desert city,
Short green grass only one story high
Offering no protection
No housing,
Little food or water
So migrate,
Across plains
Across valleys
For miles and miles migrate,
With children barely born migrate,
With amputated leg, two arms instead of six migrate,
A pilgrimage to a holy land that may no longer exist migrate
Through warzones of your cityscapes hewn down
Your villages pillaged,
Scorched and asphalted earth
Migrate?
There is no home for you here
NB. Genocide is the deliberate and systematic killing of a particular group of people. We can and should in my opinion shed our anthropocentric bias and understand our deliberate destruction of ecosystems and killing of other species as genocide, as a cleansing of particular species from the land. Might we fight for justice everywhere, in Palestine, in Kurdistan, in the Amazonias, and in our lawns.
