This year the theme is the environment. Paul Brookes is featuring environment-based poetry on his blog today. You can read the contributions here.

I’ve written so many poems on this theme, I wouldn’t know where to start to find the one I consider the best. So I churned out another one. Not necessarily good, but it’s spontaneous, and I hope some of the anger I feel comes across.

Once upon a time

There were cows in this field once
and hedges all around, where hares sat
in springtime, looking for trouble,
and blackbirds and nightingales sang.

They took the hedges out, root and branch,
and burned all trace, the hares, sporting trophies,
and cows that pied-patterned green meadows,
they interned in sheds, to beat hooves on concrete,
to never suckle their stolen calves.

Grain sprouts now in tidy, weed-free rows,
to feed the cattle stocked like white goods
in their…