John Aberdein
Saddened raver, Venus Knott, on a swaying street,
crawed up from her rotten gut Jägerbombs and Jäger neat.
Whereas V. Knott used to nav on a tanker bridge
fragile brashy coasts that slid iffy ice-shapes from their fridge,
then sailed by in hotter climes Mauna Loa staff
grieving over CO2 zooming up the graph
due to deepest empires having coal and oil to burn
as folk with bare a whiff of it suffered out of turn
while at crapshoot, Exxon, lax,
sank a chilly flute with Goldman Sachs,
she first sobered, then rebelled––
glued her ass to glass to show-up Shell.
“Ezra Pound said Literature is news that stays news, but sadly the last line of Venus Knott is already out-of-date. After the shocking timidity of COP26, we are going to have to think far deeper and tougher about how we must come together and act. Fossil fuel majors throughout the world will ultimately have to be taken into public ownership and control, in effect nationalised without compensation, in order to save civilisation from runaway climate chaos. Just as Rosa Luxemburg said a century ago when the world was riven by murderous imperialism, the choice we face is socialism or barbarism.”
John Aberdein is a former scallop diver, sea kayak coach and Arvon tutor who lives in Hoy, Orkney, and has a couple of novels to his name.
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