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. 
© Bridget Pitt please do not reproduce without permission.
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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 |