TE23 Double Feature

Gaia Warnings

Philip Burton

Wheat Sheds a Tear

Flood On the winter-caked lawn, snowdrops arrived first like a spill of blanched almonds (or dew-drenched confetti). The flood overtook them — not speedily — but worse — despite the causal elements of wind-rich tides and denser-than-usual rain — it came as a dead thing — no pulse — cold and squat as acres of window glass — a super-cooled molten mirror rising and swallowing garden steps in small steps, sobbing through air-bricks. Imagine the most unwanted kiss: a fierce tongue which penetrates the loose fabric of your being. Not only will you feel unclean. Pleuston — a floating mass of microorganisms 115

I’m bread-scented and rise naked from one seed

in the subsoil rut of an over-managed field. Cryptaestesia is my advance ticket out of here— a psychic connection to the warming atmosphere smoking above, to the heaving life of the unfarmed fringe, to the ripped victims of the plough, those crushed beneath tyres. the acid attacks of envenomed rain, the ham-fisted doing of chemical fixes, the unrecorded death of undiscovered single cells — billions in each gram of soil — the knowing next winter will widen the river and rip-tides dissolve all scent of life. I sense, below, the leaden past of petrol tractors,

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