Such a pretty yellow trinket,
did you really ever think it
capable of making happy
one sad life so dull and crappy?
Weeping sores and great big holes
fester, eating at our souls.
Is a pretty pendant worth
blasting holes in mother Earth?
Stuff the land, forget the trees
let's see rings wave in the breeze.
In the shop they shine so bright,
far from this awful dissight.
No amount of shiny things
fills the emptiness greed brings.
Leave the metal in the ground,
try to bring our senses round.
Precious, and worth more than gold,
landscapes formed in days of old.
Once lost to our careless reign,
they will not come back again.
Let's revise our stewardship,
turn it round and get a grip.
No more digging up our land,
time that we saw mining banned.
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Author Notes
Image: By Calistemon (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)
modified as permitted under terms of licence
Today's word: dissight (n.) an eyesore; anything unpleasant to look upon.
The top image is an open-cut gold mine in Western Australia. To give you an idea of the size, the bottom image is a haul-truck used in the pit. It is larger than your average house. The tiny black dots you can see scattered around the mine floor are these trucks. There is a gold mine less than half an hour from my house bigger than the one in the photo.
My much-treasured Christmas present for 2017 is a book by Paul Anthony Jones: "The cabinet of linguistic curiosities". Each page contains a descriptive story about some obscure or archaic word. It occurred to me it would be a fun exercise to try and write, each day, a poem featuring the "word of the day" from the book.
Thanks for reading.
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