One of the groups of poems on this blog is entitled 'Care of the Planet'. It's a little while since I published anything under this heading, but a visit to the coast last week reminded me both of the beauty of the sea and the constantly profligate way it expends its energy (at least, in human terms). It is, surely, the renewable energy source with by far the greatest potential. Yet all the considerable and imaginative schemes that are afloat (forgive the pun) have not yet made big impacts on the ocean's untame-ability. This poem laments that and pleads with the sea to help!
Colossal, capricious ocean
Colossal, capricious ocean,
when will you, at last
yield up your untold wealth of energy
for the benefit of humankind?
When will you emerge pre-eminent
in the undeclared contest
with those more fickle competitors, sun
and wind?
Each attempting to supply insatiable
demands
for power, for heat, and to
communicate,
without perceived scarring of
landscapes
which too readily provide shelters
for objections
from the climatologically-blind?
Wondrously, you are constant
in your twice daily ebb and
flow.
Even in flat calm an underlying swell
moves beneath your faint, slight
ripples
and tantalizingly,
power expends on the shifting of
sand,
the passage of invertebrates
and other processes
we neither see nor comprehend.
So your riches seem unharvested,
Disappointingly dissipated
and in human terms, maybe mis-spent.
Will you help us find a secret,
an unexpected key
to how your bounty can be unlocked.
Will it lie in your strange quantum
qualities*,
in re-imagined wave dynamics,
revealed in tidal motions of a far
off planet
or something even more unexpected
that will render your secrets
unblocked?
Surely on this generous planet,
which has o’er time
bestowed such blessings on the human
race,
there will be a moment
when inspired, inventive minds
will cry together ‘Eureka’ once
again,
enabling you to prevent, with mighty
grace
the demise of a sterile planet
choked by the folly of a continuing