Soot

A whole nation driving into a sooty cloud
can't see how a demand for comfort
creates a wind strong enough to rip
the black soil off from Fenland
and hang it up against the smoky sunshine,
while government says, "Drive through that!
We'll all be wealthy one day!"
Once, the sea draining from those acres
left Britain this rich harvesting. But us,
we're car-owners travelling blind
through farmlands of hedgeless fields
which hunger for high yields.
You know, when our topsoil goes for good
there's nothing underneath but stodgy clay;
The clay is surfacing across England
it plates with grey the black flatlands formerly
pinstriped with vivid greens of potato tops
drained by dykes like silver wires.

Blinded.

Dunes are on the move in Western Africa.
The dunes are moving in on Nouakchott,
four miles a year, reaching outskirts
where refugees form squatter camps.
Burkina Faso's camels
heaved over on the roadside like lorries in ditches.
Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Northern Ghana,
Lake Chad six per cent the size it used to be,
people tempted into apathy,
their goats are wandering in the desert.
Africans enriched by independence
now, like colonialists, in ugly parodies
of tribal land-grabbing, oust farmers
who walk blinded into clouds of dust.
The same farmers, urged by necessities,
drive nomads ever further inland
across the desert margin, the Sahel.
Red Saharan dust over Europe gathering,
turning into soot.