The Tempest

Do you feel the great turning, the maelstrom coming around, spitting sparks of searing birds that circle each other screaming in a language like pain? Blisters burning feathers, beaks and eyes till they ignite like flares spiralling in the tempest of this world. High performance vehicles lose their wings in ever-turning pressure, four by fours and pickups, thousand cc superbikes all spinning round and round. Their windows, bumpers, lights and panels flail off into airy channels, ricochet off stop lights scutter down the highway till they form an evil spout. Sucking up the houses, gardens, fences, trees and chickens, dogs and cats and mice and rats and farmyard animals. Spinning them so hard they break up turning and exploding like cartons spraying all across the town. Gaining pace the maelstrom grows, widens, sucks up earth and loess, strips the soil and grinds it up and spits it out. Spreads over the terrain, living feeding off the pain, sucking the last seeds from the fields. Finds the streams and all the rivers, cuts them out like veal and liver, eats them up like a cannibal. The sound is like a roar of terror, amalgam of all vicious weather, battering, beating, bruising every soul. And yet we won’t stop the oil fields, pipelines, stripping whole horizons just for dirty shale.