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This poem was inspired by the painting below, which is based on a photograph of a man trying to douse a huge oil pipeline fire that decimated his community in Nigeria. The poem was published in The Thinker Vol 42 2012.
 Copyright Bridget Pitt
© Bridget Pitt please do not reproduce without permission.
Salvation swims towards us

Ash falls like snow
on we the damned
Who stand knee-deep
in sombre grief.

In the yellow glare of oil-fed flares,
The vultures fly in widening gyres
Or pick the meat from splintered bones
Of shattered hope and shattered homes

Black gold,
They call it

Those soft skinned men in hard machines
Who, like bloated leeches, drain earth’s veins
Of every dark and viscous drop.
And though each drop exhorts the price
Of countless lives (plant, man and beast)
It feeds but metal moving parts
Of tills and tanks and armoured cars
Of whining jet planes dropping death -
And chokes all living breath

But in some distant ice blue seas
Some cobalt canted crisp white seas
Our salvation swims: with splayed webbed paws
It carves an arc through ice clipped waves
Its silent ripples spreading wide
Refracted through the crystal tides
A mass of fur and muscled claw

So powerful, huge, yet dwarfed again

By vast unbroken heaving plains -
As crumbling ice shelves crack and yield
to the slick and slide of fractured reefs
that shrink, and sink like melting stones,

The polar bear swims on,
Alone

Salvation swims towards us
With weary strokes, and fading strength
In widening seas that grant no rest.

It meets a tiny swirl in plastic blue:
A pail of water – almost through
It glistens in that last sweet flow
Splashed to cool a ravaged brow

Salvation drowns, the fires burn,
And still the twisted drills will turn...

Until we lift our smoke-screened eyes
Raise our dripping, oil-flecked snouts
Crack our hard-shelled shrivelled hearts
And let life’s streams flow free again
from hand to paw; from leaf to skin.

For if we don’t, each dying bear
That sinks beneath our blank-faced fear
Will pull us down through sunless depths
Until we join in breathless death
Until our bones slide with theirs
In the suck and sigh of empty tides

Beneath the ice chilled air.

© Bridget Pitt


    Please contact me if you would like to reproduce this poem in electronic or print form

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