Grass Rules Sometimes I forget the pervasive need of our culture To exert control Over nature The necessity to squash what is wild The perverse desire for order Sometimes I overlook the very “British” obsession With tidiness Its self-policing nature The intrinsic social competitiveness of it all The well kept Freshly mown lawn That symbol of the moral person The good citizen With community values The tidy lawn of the Englishman That beats his wife Then whistles While chop chop chopping that grass And trimming those edges And smiling gayly to his neighbours The well-managed lawn of the social climber Recently promoted to the middle class And intent on remaining there They leave the blossoming vegetable patch Leave the leaves, flowers and herbs With uses their grandparents used to know Leave leave leave that all behind and greedily claim the status-serving sterility Of the 1-inch-grass. Human slaves to the real ruling elite Green blades sitting comfortably on their dearly sprayed Watered and trimmed thrones The ecological mirror held to a societal monoculture Who domesticated whom? Green Rage Red Hands Rage green rage Green grass Green stained blades With blood of butterflies and buddleja Woodlice and lilacs Unborn stillborn Still born? I hope But then where do they grow, live Suddenly transported from the rich country meadow To the sterile desert city, Short green grass only one story high Offering no protection No housing, Little food or water So migrate, Across plains Across valleys For miles and miles migrate, With children barely born migrate, With amputated leg, two arms instead of six migrate, A pilgrimage to a holy land that may no longer exist migrate Through warzones of your cityscapes hewn down Your villages pillaged, Scorched and asphalted earth Migrate? There is no home for you here
NB. Genocide is the deliberate and systematic killing of a particular group of people. We should in my opinion shed our anthropocentric bias and value non-human’s as peoples too. We can and should understand our deliberate destruction of ecosystems and systematic killing of other species, other peoples, as genocide, as a cleansing from the land. Might we fight for justice everywhere, in Palestine, in Kurdistan, in the Amazonias, and in our lawns.