Tag: anthropocene

• Counter-poem: Selima’s snail

  

  
  The Poetry Review — submissions for non-members of The Poetry Society
  Submitted on August 17, 2022

  Your name
  Conny Borgelioen

  Titles & no. of poems submitted
  Selima’s snail 1

  Cover Letter
  Dear editors,

  I felt somewhat riled by Selima Hill’s poem “The Snail”, published in The Poetry Review Summer edition and on the website. I have much respect for this poet’s extensive oeuvre and long-established career, but the anthropocentric and speciesist tone of this poem didn’t go down well with me on this particular day. I felt compelled to write a little counter-poem.

  Best regards,

  Conny Borgelioen

  
  Selima’s snail

  My world was a ditch, rich in everything
  I needed, when I was plucked — my gills flapped
  from fear — from my garden home. Life had been
  interrupted abruptly. Frightening,
  the pink deformed blob appeared in my sky
  many times, this fleshy mass hovering.
  I learned to associate it with force
  feeding of ever more exotic food-
  stuff that left my radula tingling.
  Alone, I would just zone out for days

  on end, there was nothing to do but look
  for a way out from the top of a rock.
  A sinful waste of life, I never had
  a chance to perform the important tasks
  of my species. I would explore the boundary
  of my prison, looking for a cranny,
  a small crack, in the slippery container,
  to wiggle my way through and out at night.
  Robbed of my meaning, I hardly slept.
  It is absurd to imagine me happy.

  December 2, 2022

  anthropocene, Poetry, speciesism

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• Doggerland

  I travelled by land,
  	did not come by sea,
  I wasn’t carried
  by the rippled surface you see today.
  
  I slowly walked here		a long way
  following a trail,
  footprints in the sticky black earth.
  A syllable by keratin, 
  	indentation made
  in the search for food and water,
  	the edges already crumbling.
  
  	Nothing was wasted,
  I made a hunting weapon out of antler bone,
  Soft skin protected me.
  We were together, I 	grateful.
  
  All this was mine and it wasn’t 
  an easy life,
  but I was free 		to walk
  			where I wanted to
  	and I was full,
  
  until the earth shook
  and the land cursed me,
  
  with bruise-coloured water, cold, dark,
  	but not without life.
  
  Until I learned
  	new uses for skin,
  		salt settled on me like a sheet.
  
  Then I was full again.
  	I was free to float
  where I wanted to.
  

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  I hope you like this new poem I’m sharing with you today. I’m considering this poem as the opening poem in my new book that is coming out in the summer of next year. The book is going to be called Thrutopia, after the term coined by philosopher Rupert Read in an article published on the Huffington Post UK website in 2017.

  September 2, 2022

  anthropocene, climate change, historical poetry, nature poetry, Poetry, submerged

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