Not yet the last Summer Exhibition

Last week we went to see the Summer Exhibition

An annual artistic fest of every aspect and description

But this year it was different, challenges cognitive and visceral

For one after another the entries were both imaginative and literal.

?Our beautiful earth, take your pick, God’s or nature’s own creation

Is no longer slowly dying, but on a rapid slide to devastation

A map of Great Britain, now mostly coloured blue

Ice-caps melt, the seas all rise, inland towns to have an ocean view

?An installation of a carbon palm with blackened leaves and branches

Images of drought dry fields where once were farms and ranches

Three paintings of a dodo, an unsurprising symbol from our history

The reasons for extinction not exactly hidden mystery

The winds grow strong, the wildfires blaze, the floods are deep and wide

Wherever you live there soon will be, no time nor place to hide

?I wouldn’t take a ten-year-old to see this foretaste of their future

Although we all can get this frightened in front of a computer

It made me scared, it made me sad, it made me angry and despairing

It won’t much matter what’s in the bank

When our institutions start to crack

And the ecology of our precious earth is broke beyond repairing

?

I know this post is really dark, but I don’t know what else to do

Everyone I talk with is in my bubble too

I don’t believe that people are heartless or don’t care

But most are really busy or just surviving - simply unaware

CEOs, baristas, teachers, farmers, actors

Politicians, gardeners, psychologists and janitors ?

All are capable of loving – they have families, they have friends

And the last thing anyone would want is for this glorious world to end

So it must be down to all of us to wake every sleeping voice

More greed and global damage or a spark of hope – our choice.