Is it pride, the illusion of knowing more than we know:
Our false if certain belief that we can, must, change what is
Because what will be, might just be better?

Is it such things, such ways, which upset that natural balance
Of life leading
To suffering?

For there is only that living which accepts
The land, the sun, the weather, the toil to live
Drawing nourishment from Her soil:
Too fast, this modern machine-city life
Where we no longer dwell amid the slow changes
That slowly break from this planetary tilt and turn
Where we live balanced between sky and earth
With feet, only feet, to carry us slowly to only where
We have a nurtured need to go,
Out, out, among the small ancestral space
Of a land which is our home.

Instead, now, that manic pace constrains, conflicts,
Providing only an unconnected passing
Between our beginning and an immature end
Where we do not know, do not feel, Her slow nurturing love
Renewed each warm Spring, each Summer's heat,
Gift of our nearest star
Whose essence, as a father, made us.

Instead: we kill, we strive, are proud to know,
Preening ourselves at the mirror of Destiny.
There is thus no straight evolution, no upward living
To the thinking, dwelling, where our Earth is but one place, one home,
Among so many
And we centre ourselves between our darkness and their welcoming light.
Instead: we continue to kill that which we cannot create
Blessed then cursed by Her gift of Thought,
Unable, unwilling to grow as trees grow, rooting themselves
In Her earth.
 

Nearby, chainsaw-man sets about the hedge, the tree, with a will
Killing what he cannot create:
But it is only one small, one more, Winter space
Home to a myriad things;
There is no thought, there, of Winter berries food for wing-borne life:
No thought of insects waiting on Winter's end:
No thought of buds sleeping, waiting, for Her warming wake-up call:
No thought of tree alive as he lives:
Instead, there is killing, striving, the pride that knows.

DW Myatt