When climate change comes home

In the places I have always roamed.

There was a wave of grief

That such horrors could sink their teeth

Into the wilds of the North East.

Ecological destruction is a beast.

More than any monster or myth.

This is something we all live with.

I remember the feeling when I saw it.

My heart sank into a pit.

A beautiful minke whale beached.

The end of its life unnaturally reached.

This large mammal, a king of the seas.

Lying there. I felt myself freeze.

This is where I have grown up in.

The lands of my kin.

And destruction has arrived.

Into this place where nature thrived.

To make it worse

Almost like this was a curse

I turned away from the whale

And that one death seemed to pale.

As far as the eye could sea

Hundreds of bird bodies

Sanderlings, seagulls, crows and many more

All scattered on the sandy floor.

Avian flu had burned through.

What should we even do?

I wish that could have been the end

That we turned a bend

But a little further along

A seal dead where they did belong

In the face of such loss

It can feel an impossibly high cost

To save the world

Considering it makes my brain feel whirled.

But we must try.

I don’t want to say goodbye

To the wonders I have seen

These should not be has beens.

So I hold onto hope

That this doesn’t need to be a slippery slope

I imagine the whale like a phoenix

Rising from the ashes to live again.