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Hello everyone.

First of all, let me apologise for my extended period of absence.
I had started to compose a poem about the devastating consequences of Coronovirus, but unfortunately I kept getting writer's block which ended up scuppering my efforts completely. Even after several rewrites.

My poetry group being online only has not helped either. I really can't get to grips with all that Zoom stuff, indeed it is the subject of my next work.

However, my most recent project has only taken about a month to write, and relates to the recent heatwaves we've been experiencing.

After much deliberation, I decided to call it "Heatwave".

It's a powerful work that describes the devastating consequences of climate change, while expressing hope that mankind's untimely demise can be averted with changes in attitude and behaviour, and the various challenges doing that may bring.

I hope you like it.

"Heatwave"
A minimalist work
© 2022 Celestine Gordson

Sun
Hot
Phew!

This is Starmer's big moment to start demonstrating what sort of a prime minister he would be, instead of just moaning about every single thing the government does.

Today was a reasonable start - we now know what he'd do with domestic energy bills, though it seems only a stop gap solution.

We need more:

There's nothing about business energy bills, which are going to put millions out of work in the coming months of nothing is done.

There's nothing about kickstarting the economy. Included in this must be a firm ruling out of any further lockdowns when the inevitable Covid case rises happen in the autumn and the usual mob start screaming for lockdowns. Businesses WILL NOT INVEST in the UK if they still fear a government that would shut them down on a whim.

He has said nothing about the green levy or energy security. He needs to ditch the ideaological climate change bollox until we have sorted the country out. That sort of stuff is for when we are doing well and not facing blackouts and mass poverty.

Time to get your ducks in a row. A general election could come VERY soon,

The media onslaught of terrifying the population continues.

Covid - not working any more
Monkeypox - tried several times
Heatwaves - nobody cares

So instead let's try this:

Nuclear war would cause global famine with more than five billion people killed

You don't say!
Just why is this the lead article on Sky News?

The economy is collapsing and we are heading for widespread povery and destitution, but look the other way everyone, billions will die if there's a nuclear war.

F*ck off, just f*ck off.

(Fork Me will be along shortly to tell me this a perfectly legitimate news story)

I wonder how many organisms we kill every day or how many die in our presence?

Flies, spiders, ants, meat produce, plants and so on.

I want to make you dizzy.
I want to make you look up into the sky and comprehend, maybe for the first time, the darkness that lies beyond the evanescent wisp of the atmosphere, the endless depths of the cosmos, a desolation by degrees.
I want the Earth to turn beneath you and knock your balance off, carry you eastward at a thousand miles an hour, into the light, and the dark, and the light again. I want you to watch the Earth rising you up to meet the rays of the morning sun.
I want the sky to stop you dead in your tracks on your walk home tonight, because you happened to glance up and among all the shining pinpricks you recognized one as of the light of an alien world.
I want you to taste the iron in your blood and see its likeness in the rust-red sands on the long dry dunes of Mars, born of the same nebular dust that coalesced random flotsam of stellar debris into rocks, oceans, your own beating heart.
I want to reach into your consciousness and cast it outward, beyond the light of other suns, to expand it like the universe, not encroaching on some envelope of emptiness, but growing larger, unfolding inside itself.
I want you to see your world from four billion miles away, a tiny glint of blue in the sharp white light of an ordinary star in the darkness. I want you to try to make out the boundaries of your nation from that vantage point, and fail.
I want you to feel it, in your bones, in your breath, when two black holes colliding a billion light years away sends a tremor through spacetime that makes every cell in your body stretch, and strain.
I want to make you nurse nostalgia for the stars long dead, the ones that fused your carbon nuclei and the ones whose last thermonuclear death throes outshined the entire galaxy to send a single photon into your eye.
I want you to live forward but see backward, farther and deeper into the past, because in a relativistic universe you don’t have any other choice. I want the stale billion-year-old starlight of a distant galaxy to be your reward.
I want to utterly disorient you and let you navigate back by the stars. I want you to lose yourself, and find it again, not just here, but everywhere, in everything.
I want you to believe that the universe is a vast, random, uncaring place, in which our species, our world, has absolutely no significance. And I want you to believe that the only response is to make our own beauty and meaning and to share it while we can.
I want to make you wonder what is out there. What dreams may come in waves of radiation across the breadth of an endless expanse. What we may know, given time, and what splendors might never, ever reach us.
I want to make it mean something to you. That you are in the cosmos. That you are of the cosmos. That you are born from stardust and to stardust you will return. That you are a way for the universe to be in awe of itself.
Disorientation by Katie Mack