The loss and damage song

THE LOSS AND DAMAGE SONG

(tune ‘Personent hodie’)

Climate change and its wounds —
what the world needs is funds,
funds of billions of pounds,
more than just a bandage,
more than I can manage.
Come COP27,
work to make things even,
put those pounds on the grounds,
mending loss and damage.

Let’s make sure our UK
is among those that pay.
We have dirtied our day
with our years’ pollution.
Here’s a resolution —
match the ash, ash, ash
pounds with cash, cash, cash.
It’s a wash, and a bash
at a best solution.

Should this nation pay more
when its people are poor?
Let the burden be for
dirty corporations.
Wipe them with taxations!
Tax ’em hard, hard, hard,
double-starred, starred, starred —
make their guilt and their gains
climate reparations.

We of Global Justice Cambridge sang the above song as our contribution to a day of action in support of such a fund as the song describes.  See our blog post for a view of the day's activity.

A movement

 

A MOVEMENT

Does there exist, and

has there ever existed,

a movement to make

the muddy plain strewn with wrecks

and lost goods west of Lisbon,

that people witnessed

some time All Saints' Day morning

1755,

the new Atlantic normal

all oceans should aspire to?

In less than an hour

sea came back, racing horses,

smashing all it touched.

Normal for when plates collide.

Not normal for living by.

This poem was written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's workshop 'Try to praise the mutilated world', which she ran as a closed Facebook group in November 2020.  The workshop was for the duration of the UK's second Covid-related lockdown, and the prompt that led to this poem was #7, on the theme of cataclysm.  I can't now remember why I made it the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.

'A movement' has now found publication in Acumen #104, September 2022.