Doronicum

I never new that Mike Harding was a poet.Helen and I went to one of his shows many years ago and he was brilliant.This poem is from "Fishing for Ghosts".Climate change if you believe in it or not is nothing compared to what is happening to insects.It has been windy enough for the local farmers to start spraying today.

One Swallow
Remember how you’d drive at night in summers past
Through fogs and mists of midges, 
Blizzards of fat bugs, snowstorms of moths
All melting on the windscreen glass?
Long, hot, country miles, you’d drive
Dry eyed and squinting out into the dark, cursing,
The windscreen frosted with their last moments,
The wipers useless, washer water gone.
You’d get back home to find the hurl and heft
And spatter, the great smears of death,
The legions lost, all dashed and hurtled to their end –
Guts, brains and wings, thorax and antennae –
Pulped into a patina you’d have to soap and scour away.
But Death comes easy for them now, no battering
Oblivion at seventy miles an hour, head on,
Just the toxic rain of money slathered across 
The meadows, hills and downs.
One swallow makes a summer now;
Soon she’ll be gone too with the bees, 
The birdsong and the riotous great clamour
That once welcomed every dawn.
And, as we face each silent year
And see the dustbowl fells and fields, 
We’ll weep for what we all have lost:
For clouds of midges, nights alive with moths, 
The scimitars of swallows, martins, swifts,
The wrens and sparrows, nightingales and jays
And the chanting birds that caroled once
All across those golden, summer days.

The weather has changed from cold and wet to warm and wet.