Tessa Ransford is past president and committee member of Scottish PEN. She is an established poet, translator, editor and cultural activist on many fronts over the last thirty years and the initiator of www.scottish-pamphlet-poetry.com and the Callum Macdonald Memorial award for poetry pamphlets. She has recently been Royal Literary Fund fellow at Queen Margaret University. Her latest book is Not Just Moonshine, New and Selected Poems, from Luath Press, Edinburgh. 'Carbon Trading' was first published in Shades of Green, Akros 2005 and has also appeared in Not Just Moonshine.
Carbon Trading
I pollute you pollute he/she/it pollutes
we pollute you all pollute they pollute
in the present tense day after day
and in the past I have polluted
you have he/she/it has you all have and
they have polluted
but in the future we'll have carbon-trading:
I shall pollute and you will sell your credits
like coffee beans among baby-sitters;
they will pollute with impunity
having planted a few trees. We'll pollute
with sanitary towels nappies cleaning bleaches
aerosols chemicals our fossil-fuel burning
our artificial clothing our trash consuming
our luxury goods and fashion-fawning
our factory-farming our nuclear waste
and our throwing out of old computers.
You and I
plod on with heavy footprint on
the earth's eroded soils and over
several times the earth's whole compass
while the poor tip-toe barefoot through
our toxic rubbish-heaps and drink
from contaminated waters breathe
our manufactured fumes beneath the
blackening clouds of global dimming.
Would that I had not/you would not
he/she/it might not/you all would never
dream of/they would cease at once
from all declensions and conjugations
of the user-friendly active regular verb: 'to pollute'.
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