‘I am the Mighty, Ancient Himalaya / Carve me at your peril’: Six poems about rebooting the planet

We are escaping the smog once again. This is becoming an annual pilgrimage. As the early morning train chugs myopically through a land of shifting shadows and ghosts, the sun, at last, bursts through. Since it rose, a monochrome train-track to nowhere has been punctuated by pylons.

I pass out in defiance, as if my psyche refuses to include this human-induced void, this avoidable catastrophe into my stream of conscious thought. Yet can I really escape it? How much of my creative life is now affected by it, how many poems has the insidious smog crept its way into? Too many.

When I come around, through the train window, a glistening. We are passing over water, like a yogi with steel feet. White glimmer then vast shining, illumination. Perhaps this is all there is at the end, a vast grey expanse, a wan sun shining dull white in an extinguished sky.

My friend and I are discussing things. It seems that the state of the Earth is all we writers talk about these days. Did you see, I ask her, did you watch the Booker Awards last night? And hear the words of winner when her novel was announced? She said that though we are all made up of…

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