Pest Control

5m

̶  5 million human beings

in 8,000 B.C. leavened at leisure to

200m by 1 A.D., in thrall to animals,

imbued with the elements, intense

ephemera enmeshed in the rest,

until the Industrial Revolution, like a steam engine

accelerator, blasted the census figure up to 1,000m by 1818.

Peasants were snatched from pastoral bonds into orchards

of hard knowledge to subordinate everything, sentient and dead,

pumping pistons, pulleys and pollution: dominion in full swing.

We are legion now, a plague upon the earth. 7,000m, a nuclear cloud of us

in 2011, increasingly alienated from organic origins and otherwise calibrated.

Ghettoes and refugee camps heave beside the chronic rash of ubiquitous developments.

We scapegoat comrade species for getting in the way and encroaching on our space

while spraying them with pesticides, sludge and garbage gunk,

razing hedgerows and habitats, culling,

drilling, clearing,

appropriating.

Waste metastasises, wrapping the planet in a carcinogenic smog.

Frantic fingers seed G.M. crops and tweak livestock without a clue about

consequences except that capital keeps accruing away to the wealthy elite

armed to the atomic zenith, sedating us with neon logo glows and terrorist woes

until they change their minds, or nature gets there first and, calling our bluff, stamps us out.

What are we to do? Our population has multiplied thousands-fold over the same surface area.

Are we pride or are we pest? Or something in between, primate and homo sapiens in one

and one for all, able to drop competition and meet in the global commons outside and in?

Can we come to our senses, stop running amok and start travelling light? Can we down-skill

to stewardship, calm the wildfire blaze of us and nurse harmony back into last-gasp

ecosystems without adding catastrophe to catastrophe? And, if we can do it, will we?  

Caroline Hurley

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/david-attenborough-says-sending-food-to-famineridden-countries-is-barmy-8823602.html

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24292615

http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Caroline's poems have previously appeared in Poetry24, as well as in The Electric Acorn, threemonkeysonline.com and in ESOF's 3nd Science Meets Poetry anthology. Clebran.org featured a chapter from her novel and some of her flash fiction. Her current focus is on young adult fiction and screenwriting. She lives near an Irish bird reserve.

Jesus Was A Home Birth

When Mary imposed on the hospitality of a full house, she was shooed
down to the domestic quarters, where servants and oxen dwelt,
to bear her child, enfolded in the peace and love that would be his trademark.
A wrathful tyrant terrified of being usurped hunted them into Egypt,
taking out infants wholesale, like the first male physicians whose callous
unclean hands ripped new-borns from the womb a century ago.

            Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
            Do you observe the calving of the deer?

Having long shunned human generation, dodging the maternity bed, now
the masculine penetrates silent holy nights with gadgets and egos, all bull
in china-shop, closing ranks around the damage done by strict procedures,
hysterically shrieking blue murder at common complications caught under
the midwife’s flexible watch, micro-monitoring her every move, zooming in
for the smoking gun, judge and jury at their beck and call and in their pocket. 

Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?

            Do you observe the calving of the deer?

Until Ternovsky, with child, stood up, like David with Goliath, to The Man.
She won the right, in theory, for women to tender preferred terms during
nativity, in this era when the instinct to seek out dark quiet spaces away
from ward-like mayhem is blinded and numbed by emergency flurries, when
the impulse to relax in a private place, only a mothering presence
nearby for an exultant welcome, has almost been driven extinct. 

Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?

            Do you observe the calving of the deer?

For safe home birth, women still take flight, politically-motivated pillars
Of society hot on their heels barking out doctored books of evidence,
the pro-life posse nowhere to be found in their defence, the crux of trained
attendants ignored, a public panicking to make sense of a power struggle
raging at the threshold of life. Time is money. Wham! Bang! Thank you, Mam!
As for the rest, don’t ask if refusal offends; there’s room at the infirmary only. 

©Caroline Hurley 
Aja Teehan's story
Irish midwives suffer setback
Midwives response

Vorsprung durch Technik

Without a welfare top-up, the pittance paid to Aufstockers,

German contract workers, a million plus, leaves them short.

A dwindling dole reduces their compatriots to skip-searches and roadkill.

Decrepit wraiths are stretchered out of nursing home cells

to face court charges, on account of their employment long ago

as lowly camp attendants, of colluding in The Holocaust

(mainstreamed as a unique event, nothing like it happening since).

A mile walked in worn-out shoes soon shows the wisdom of conformity

gurus like Goffman. Nobody wants to lose face for the sake of it.

Group trends overwhelm. Zimbardo, Milgram, Bion, Asch, Foucault

and others reported truths to set us free, whyfew would follow Socrates.

The stinging fly is a endangered species. We do what we must

for survival in the herd, brute survival, civilised by a serial number.

The other half harvest cooked credit ratings, guilt absolved by the dogma

That the crucified poor, exposed for easy aim, are socially weak.

The earnings gap globally widens. There’s loadsa money in war.

We surf on byproducts making us high and fiddle as our home burns.

We are always catching up with a panic of justice that persecutes

inconvenient proofs of our rank conspiracy, induced

by the logs in our eyes and the bars on our hearts

Germany's working poor.
Trials for camp guards

©Caroline Hurley

Sunday review

The week began on a sad note for poetry as the news of the death of Seamus Heaney broke. Caroline Hurley's excellent poem "Salt of Our Earth" paid a great tribute to him in words and images that evoked his life and work perfectly.
John Saunders' poem "Atropine" was Tuesday's poem and said a lot in a few words. The contrast with the death dealing Belladonna plant and the antidote for gas attacks is very well made.
David Mellor's poem "NOT YOU" made a good point on Wednesday about how we can so easily switch off from horrendous events such as the gas attack. The downside of being as well informed about these things is that it is very easy to feel helpless and this leads to turning away .
My own poem for Seamus Heaney "Sláinte" was Thursday's poem. Siobhan raised some good points in the comments.
Carolyn Cornthwaite's poem "How Shalt Thou Kill Me?" 
Was Friday's poem and made the point about big nations and their, sometimes, contradictory stances. It is a memorable poem.
Luigi Pagano's poem "Rumpus in Olympus" continued the story of the current business elite who actually seem like criminals, must be a camera trick, eh? 
Keep up the submissions folks and have a good week. We have some blossom happening in NZ which is certainly cheering the place up a bit.

Salt Of Our Earth

In memory of Seamus Heaney

The crux of the august poet tolls sombrely now:
‘what do we say any more
to conjure the salt of our earth?’

It’s hard to believe what we hear
when the man won’t raise it again,
the Ard-File who fleshed out bog-bodies,
combatants and blackberries,
who captured the coffin’s chastisement,
the hope, despite strife of history,
for the redress of rhyme
through counter-realities created,
imagined things like magnetic gems
luring the lopsided flotsam
back on an even keel.

Since he’s called away, the torrent
of linguistic crystals he wrought
stay, strewn in his wake, stepping-stones
across the treacherous ocean of consciousness
still linking our stakes.

© Caroline Hurley

 Obituary: Heaney ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats’

Caroline's poems have previously appeared in Poetry24, as well as in The Electric Acorn, threemonkeysonline.com and in ESOF's 3nd Science Meets Poetry anthology. Clebran.org featured a chapter from her novel and some flash fiction. Her current focus is on young adult fiction and screenwriting. She lives near an Irish bird reserve.

Woman in Chains

Slavery: “the condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers of the right of ownership are exercised” – 1926 Slavery Convention

In Liverpool city, the International Slavery Museum

curates relics of humans subjugated by their own kind:

collars, brands, whips, shackles, bits and so on, ad nauseum.

In relationships skewed by absolute power, the ties that bind

one person to another as property, that life and fate controlled,

are everywhere declared wrong; anathema to the natural mind.

Restrictions on movement, coercion, the use of force, are enrolled

to compel servitude. The arrogation of sexuality is a sign too

of heinous exploitation of the unwilling weak. A story as old

as the fundamental panic to disarm your woman and rule,

to seduce and use, mating and begetting. She bears the brunt

of your pro-life fanaticism, your anti-wife bias, your sleight to sue

and deprive the world of salvation’s best hope  -  her blood every month

for her own regulation, her agency blessed, the posse called off the hunt.

© Caroline Hurley

Abortion law: what comes next?

Caroline Hurley's poems have previously appeared in Poetry24, as well as in The Electric Acorn, threemonkeysonline.com and in ESOF's 3nd Science Meets Poetry anthology. Clebran.org featured a chapter from her novel and also some flash fiction. Her current focus is on young adult fiction and screenwriting. She lives near an Irish bird reserve.

The Dove Returns To Derry

In a currach they row with their treasure trove

to the peace bridge that’s loved so well.

Summoned sun rays brighten the brand-new day.

At the church-dove’s prayer, here comes the summer.

Patron saint, Colmcille, was descended from kings,

one of Finnian’s twelve apostles of Ireland.

When he stepped out of line he was faced with exile

or a curse, so Iona he chose.

The return of the monk invites grand festive funk.

Costumes, props and trucks presage processions.

On the streets of Derry, from the old shirt factory,

girls and gymnasts join punks and monastics.

Dopey Dick, céilí players float past. Footballers

run with hounds, clowns and oversized babies.

Stewards, fitters and first-aid crews herd swelling crowds

pulled from far and wide, game to unite  ̶  

worlds away from cruel war, by which Colmcille marred

his record of unselfish wisdom.

After copying a book, he came back, when ‘twas took,

with rebellion that butchered battalions.

Over land rights and flags and religious tags,

the Ulster folk have too long suffered,

till civic and church leaders yielded, conceded,

and high-fived the Good Friday agreement.

As Nessie was charmed by kind outstretched arms,

so is malice and prejudice banished.

A model for peace on earth to make hate cease

incarnates at this hot mid-June féte.

To the serpent, the Dove bade, “go back with all speed!”

which his flock chants to foul-play and violence;

as one, across walls, oaks, the Foyle and town halls,

they sing, “now you are entering free Derry.”

Derry City of Culture 2013

  © Caroline Hurley

Maleficium

“There were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written about. [Better is] silence and discretion.” – Salazar, lawyer & objector to 17th century witch-trials.

In an enlightened Ireland, colonised no more
by England or Rome or anywhere,
nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

Nonetheless, here it is, like the triumvirate
of headmaster, priest and guard who once
governed intimate relations in the villages.

Ideologues lobby and bullies jockey;
careerists territorialising biological turf,
comically aped by their cosseted wags.

They rail, apoplectic, and insist on the charge
that the gravid female can feign suicidal ideation,
as if in fear that there be witches here.

They’d make her swim to test her guilt, if they could.
Instead, if her mood lifts too much post-partum, they’ll nail her
with a sentence heavier than any laid on a serial killer.

If, perilously inseminated, she’s any sense, she’ll choose
the water terminus by boat or plane herself over long-term
dominion of a misogynistic, hypocritical and archaic system.

Otherwise she’ll be tried by a panel of three untouchables,
her evidence and confession extorted in exchange
for the indelible stamp of insanity on public record.

She’ll be stigmatised like the sacked midwives,
last refuge of conscientious women, before her;
both loath to inflict on ill-begotten unborn embryos

the perverse right to mean lives induced by
breeding-mongering cadres of mostly male gynae pros
bleeding the world and his groaning wife dry.

© Caroline Hurley

Maternity hospital masters differ over suicide provision in planned legislation

Jail term of up to 14 years for a woman who has an abortion in Ireland ‘bizarre’

Witch trials in the early modern period

Caroline's poems have previously appeared in Poetry24, as well as in The Electric Acorn, threemonkeysonline.com and in ESOF's 3nd Science Meets Poetry anthology. Clebran.org featured a chapter from her novel and some flash fiction. Her current focus is on young adult fiction and screenwriting. She lives near an Irish bird reserve.

Collectable Things

Silently, invisibly, a gentle wind glances off the ways
of things that seem filled with the intent to be watched
and weighed; the disasters or crimes, set by places and by times,
at war with what can’t be compelled and is often lost.

Conquistadors compounded cultural estates.
Darwin, the Dutch, Wallace & Co, helped themselves
on islands explored. They reached out and effortlessly
wrung the necks of fearless birds as though plucking apples;
as if the trust of the predator-free creatures was begging
to be exploited and to be thanked with extinction.

Renaissance men libelled the gristly dodo, calling them disgusting,
lazy-arsed beasts while guzzling them down to the last one.
For state bounty, the Tasmanian tiger, reigning over the food-chain,
was hunted from its livelihood; the final thylacine expired as
the Nazi holocaust gained ground. In this twenty-first century,
remaining rhinos risk carnage by poachers hacking their cornucopian horns
that leaven medical brews, gild weapons and ornamental figaries.

Evidence they existed; is that enough to palliate the loneliness of
human spirit first prognosticated after mass buffalo slaughters?
Like seeds that need to be constantly watered and lit before sharing
their natures, conditions must be attended to conserve companion species;
in the same way that love, once neglected and bled, can degenerate
to seem like a dead shell, just a punishable collectable thing.

© Caroline Hurley

Natural World: Flight of the Rhino

Flight of the Rhino

Caroline's poems have previously appeared in Poetry24 and they have also been published in The Electric Acorn and threemonkeysonline.com. Clebran.org featured a chapter from her novel and some flash fiction. Her current focus is on young adult fiction and screenwriting. She lives near an Irish bird reserve.

Perversities

Postponing years of a life already diabolically infringed upon
By the imposition of a father’s lust on her defenceless young flesh,
She appeals over the family head: social justice is once more transgressed.

Austerity cuts keep the people lean, in line, and the prisons full;
Over-crowded, violent and drug-soaked, save for the sexual offenders,
Cossetted, apart, in clover, and for the fallen fat-cats in their first-class cells.

Restorative measures, worthwhile for inducing wrongdoers to understand and
Endure consequences of their crimes, are back-burnered; their cathartic truths
Faithfully practised only by conscientious objectors and by common criminals inside.

© Caroline Hurley

Man who raped daughter  for 10 years released on bail

Why our jails fail

Caroline's poems have previously appeared in Poetry24. Some were also published in the e-magazine, The Electric Acorn. Besides poetry, she's written a novel, short stories, and both a stage and screenplay. Clebran.org featured a chapter from her novel and some flash fiction. Her current project is young adult fiction.

The God Particle

Far below the Swiss-French border hides
Cern’s Large Hadron Collider, its one
aim to unveil  the bases of all
things by crashing beams to strike a spark
from high-speed energies: the sly God
particle too chaste for eyes to see.

Those bits, as far as Plato could see,
comprise the universe where life hides
in matter; the Pleroma of God
imperfectly copied from the One
who lights the darkness with the spark
that animates the chaos of it all.

Science tries to retro-model how all
came to be, filching concepts to see
systems of phenomena, shy spark
aside that with religion hides
beside truth and reason, leading one
to wonder about scientists without God.

The map is not what is, or what God
made, the beautifully-dressed earth, all
planted, watered planet, th’only one
to sustain growth and creatures who see
with conscious presence. This witness hides.
Behind the manifold dwells the Spark.

Sages down the ages claimed the spark;
its myriad images called God,
even as it runs away and hides
to stay free for ready hire by all.
Undemanding innocents can see
In a grain infinity in one.

Contemplatives say they feel as one
in states at rest accessing the spark.
They tell of sublime visions they can see
and of direct messages from God.
The divine ordinary in all
is near as breath; now it shows, now hides.

In Lila the one I love to see
spins off and hides with the stolen spark
from my heart all splayed when I hark God.

© Caroline Hurley

God or the God Particle: Are Science and Faith really in Conflict?
 
Caroline's poems have been published in e-magazine, The Electric Acorn. She recently returned to post-graduate psychology studies and has also written a novel, short stories, and both a stage and screenplay.

Grey Shades, Thin Lines

Shhh! He’s coming! She tenses, acutely attuned to his mood as a gauge of what’s next.
“Bitch! Where’s my beer?” He shouts, head in the fridge. Not good.
Thwack! Right hook to her ear fells her to the floor.
Krrunch! The boot to the ribs, twice, drives home.
Gasp! She stays put, the fight in her dying by the day.
Splat! He’s lying on her, pawing. “Me darling girl!”
Vroom! One hand gags her mouth, the other loosens their clothes.
Bang! He’s in, animal, crushing her bones, her snuffable neck snapped back in his macho headlock.

On a gentleman’s charitable whim, a flight of gallant largesse, he funds her make-over.
He massages her urge to survive hard knocks
and arranges an experiment in social behaviour.
The hypothesis states: with temptation she’ll buckle
and develop a taste for the finer things in life.
Primed, groomed, escorted and taught elocution,
she obliges and ditches her rags and plain talk on cue.
Her noble patron puffs up with chauvinistic pride in his coup of a distinctive statistic.

Being of sound mind and body, Sub agrees to sign Dom’s meticulous, clinical contract,
to serve full-time for a spell as his literal slave;
to respect and obey, wearing his collar and baring her tail;
to grant and procure, as he wants, sexual contacts;
to relinquish society’s frills outside just for him;
to sit at his right foot, devout, with it all hanging out;
to count, while he canes, flogs or rends her, his strokes,
and to thank him for accepting her in his almighty system of disciplinary ciphers.

Precious blood-gems scintillate, mounted on gold; the marital ring signifies standards upheld
by institutional networks she buys into, for better or worse.
She and her husband try not to burn out or stray
from their domestic node where they may reproduce
unrestrained, rewarded for their contribution
to the bloodstock and brains for public production,
to extend and defend the national interests:
individuals churned out in numbers to neuter the personal place and force the race on. 

The relative risks run by separate sex-pairing memes accrete to expunge one another,
when he who takes on all-comers with daredevil mettle
shivers and melts in her grace, craving her benediction
as if every woman is Kali, Tantrically-enlightened,
entitled to all he can muster, to his last breath,
in winning her devouring clench, her cascading devotion
 unto death, even, proving her love everlasting.
With biases ceded in swelling communion, a kind, cosmic presence minds hearts that beat true.

© Caroline Hurley

50 Shades of Grey? Just an old-fashioned love story, says EL James

Caroline's poems have been published in e-magazine, The Electric Acorn. She recently returned to post-graduate psychology studies and has also written a novel, short stories, and both a stage and screenplay.

Poor Brother Whale

Seasick yet still docked, poor brother Whale!
He drifted into shallow West Cork water
at the mercy of a human gaol
as if for extreme unction, pre-inter.

He drifted into shallow West Cork water;
a fin whale, fourteen metres long and counting,
as if for extreme unction, pre-inter,
his crisp white stripes of surrender rotating.

A fin whale, fourteen metres long and counting;
Leviathan, wilting, handing himself in,
his crisp white stripes of surrender rotating,
inviting hospitality, this wild thing.

Leviathan, wilting, handing himself in,
majestic mammal of the oceans deep,
inviting hospitality, this wild thing,
from a fellow species, moved to weep.

Majestic mammal of the oceans deep,
is judged too massive to be euthanized.
From a fellow species, moved to weep,
he trusts to meet with kindness as he dies.

Despite our plunder and pollution, thank you  ̶
seasick yet still docked, poor brother Whale,
for showing such simple faith you’ll get your due
at the mercy of a human gaol.

© Caroline Hurley

Hope begins to fade for fin whale stranded in Baltimore Harbour

Caroline's poems have been published in e-magazine, The Electric Acorn. She recently returned to post-graduate psychology studies and has also written a novel, short stories, and both a stage and screenplay. 

Wrong Cue

When the blues go viral,
Companies love misery,
Suck lucre from plagues.

In hotel lobbies,
Life coaches schedule miracles.
Score more goals, they urge;

Surrender to the
Moment’s power of here and now    ̶
As if creatures don’t.

International
Famous gurus swash-buckle
Their way inside heads

Like hitchhikers’ guides
Or galactic Gibranic prophets.
There’s nowhere to hide.

Jeremy Kyle
Sorts simpletons out, gung-ho,
On television.

Doesn’t he? One-man
DSMIV, and much much more,
Suggests the blurb.

Professionals, ‘client-
Centred’, judge suitability,
Engage on their terms.

Disturbed, one flew over
The cuckoo’s nest, long-jumping
Electrocution.

A plain ‘how are you’
Forestalls elaboration;
Close counsel is hugged.

New Age bad language
Abounds from self-help mongers.
In wings, Big Pharma’s poised.

What would Lao Tsu say
To koans proliferating
Like primed cluster-bombs?

Or Thoreau, retreating
Not en masse, a la mode,
But discrete, alone?

Not everyone can
Master motorcycle
Repair, or wants to.

Be scotching them we
Must, Yoda’d caution; dart the
Forces of Darkness.

Thinking positive,
Python-esque, is pushed: how come
We’re still not there yet?

Smack ‘em back to flat;
Set to zero, starved, empty  ̶
Need’s where profit’s at.

Manufactured need,
Dimming in the name of light.
No. Turn back. Go native.

 © Caroline Hurley

Is the practice of self-help helpful?

Caroline's poems have been published in e-magazine, The Electric Acorn. She recently returned to post-graduate psychology studies and has also written a novel, short stories, and both a stage and screenplay.

How Science Rates With Poetry

Science presents accounts versus a story
Of things observed exactly by the eye;
The truth of all, from earth’s core to the sky.
Measured to fit standards, but poetry
Blithely lifts an item from its category
To enjamb it with a fact or lie,
Fluttering gaily like a butterfly
From phantom flowers back to reality.

Just as little children have to play
To stretch their senses and their intellect,
Of how science rates with poems it’s wrong to say
They’re at cross-purposes, they don’t connect
When both their emissary’s a mockingjay
Copying, eavesdropping – and if I know, I’m fecked!

© Caroline Hurley

Science Meets Poetry at ESOF 2012

Caroline's poems have been published in e-magazine, The Electric Acorn. She recently returned to post-graduate psychology studies and has also written a novel, short stories, and both a stage and screenplay.