We in the cities consider ourselves beyond the 'simplistic' beliefs
of the Indians. But even in the cities we aren't safe from the fear of nature.
We fear an imminent ecological catastrophe as a result of upsetting the
balance of nature. We examine our skins for melanomas as we wait for science
to offer a solution to the hole in the ozone layer, which science failed
to notice, and the effects of which it can't predict. We huddle like children
in the forest as doomsayers predict global warming, floods and famine. We
buy anything in a green package and we are inclined to buy into the theory
of Gaia, The Earth Goddess, propounded by Professor James Lovelock, which
says, paraphrasing the Indians, that the earth is a living being and, scavenged
of her forces and choked with poisons, she will soon be vomiting all over
us, engulfing up our puny civilisation, and lying fallow for a few hundred
millennia.
-Paul Rambali, In the Cities and Jungles of Brazil
Beneath the ebon gloom of mounting rocks
The little pools lie poisonously still,
And birds come to the edge in forlorn flocks,
And utter sudden, plaintive notes and thrill,
Pecking at strangely gray-green substance;
But never do they dip their bills and drink.
They twitter, sad beneath the mournful trees,
And fretfully flit to and from the brink,
In little gray-brown, green-and-purple flocks,
Beneath the jet-gloom of the mounting rocks.
And green-eyed moths of curious design,
With gold-black wings and rarely silver-dotted,
On nests of flowers among those rocks recline,
Bold, burning blossoms, strangely leopard-spotted,
But breathing deadly poison from their lips.
And every lovely moth that wanders by,
And from the blossoms fatal nectar sips,
All green-eyed moths of curious design
That on the fiercely-burnig blooms recline.
-Claude McKay, from The Desolate City
Garden of Eden
Who loves a garden
Finds within his soul
Life's whole;
He hears the anthem of the soil
While ingrates toil;
And sees beyond his little sphere
The waving fronds of heaven, clear.
- Louise Seymour Jones, Who Loves a Garden
Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams;
I watch the green field growing
For reaping folk and sowing,
For harvest time and mowing,
A sleepy world of streams.
- Algernon Charles Swinburne, from The Garden of Proserpine
I want free life and I want fresh air;
And I sigh for the canter after the cattle,
The crack of the whips like shots in a battle,
The medleyof horns and hoofs and heads
That wars and wrangles and scatters and spreads;
The green beneath and the glue above,
And dash and danger, and life and love.
-Frank Desprez, from Lasca
The Tie that Binds
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