Rookwood Remedy

 “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

 

Is it enough to know a green space

is there waiting full of potential? 

Or are we alright with a green screen 

backdrop of a landscape we have a vague idea of? 

Ozymandias is Shelley’s meditation 

on the vanity of human civilisations 

and the Phyrric victories over nature. 

A funny thing about the rising universe, 

Horsham’s tribute in fountain form, 

to their son is that it has survived 

somewhere in a private garden. 

The peculiar thing about a Percy Bysshe Shelly poem

is that it can never be destroyed 

by humanity’s drive for progress. 

Unlike his poetry the landscape that inspired it 

can so easily be destroyed for all enternity 

with no potential for restoration 

via creative proliferation of green ideals.  

One thing this era of virtual life has revealed 

is that the well-being of the planet’s inhabitants 

depends on actual occasions 

and encounters with nature. 

These events take us outside 

our mental cages of algorithmic order 

and allow us to feel an inkling of our full 

and sacred capacities as beings in the cosmos. 

Not specifically as calculating calibrating 

human beings but as empathising organisms 

connecting by a feeling of our place in the world. 

Knowing there is an empty swathe 

of potential green space awaiting 

my visit is the best feeling in the world. 

Knowing there was once a green space 

I might have gone to is not such a great feeling. 

The poetry of regret may have a vestige of joy 

but it does not elevate the spirit in the same way. 

Nor will such verse restore the foliage 

that brushed my stooping head as I foraged 

for sloes to make the gift that would bring a smile 

to my father’s face as I present him 

with a bottle of Rookwood remedy. 

The virtual is not simply a digital phenomenon 

but is inherent in everything. 

Somehow a belief in algorithmic order 

has created a sense that everything 

is a repeat of something else 

when a walk in Rookwood reminds us 

that we are all nature 

and difference in emergence. 

This ineffable quality of feeling 

is what we might call the virtual 

and is full of the possibility for actual change. 

And so how ironic it is that we may chose 

to use the excuse of progress 

to destroy the potential for change 

in the minds of everyday people.