Wanting to believe in the butterfly effect

 

I collect a box of groceries from cold storage,

take it to the drop-in centre, break open bread rolls

 

fill them with salad, cheese, mayonnaise; leave goofy notes

about extra cucumber for beauty treatment, or vegans,

 

in the hope that giving migrates invisible currents

to distant continents, pollinates oil barons’ and despots’ hearts —

 

They feel their hearts!

 

Yet our children watch polar ice-caps collapse on TV;

learn to say sixth mass extinction with furious fluency,

 

choose to walk to school all weathers, forego meat and dairy food,

their eyes the soot of burnt-out stumps.

 

Other days, they kneel with us, postures half hopeful, half bereft,

to press electric-white seedling roots, skinny wires

 

into the rich, dark sockets of a field’s edge, to try to light

cool lamps of leaves, to banish the creeping dread

 

that even planting trees might be as impotent

as fingers kissed to magpies, green forbidden on first-time brides.

 

Our young sons help us squash the sluggy pearls of grass grubs

that would eat the seedlings in their new-born cribs

 

but as the news reports that fresh forest fires blacken

the planet’s treasure map, one boy asks, in a toneless blank,

 

‘Why do people even have children?’

The other hugs me, his body’s slim shuttle

 

shaken with the gravity of the mind’s strain.

‘You shouldn’t have had us, Mum.’

 

But we had you because we loved the world.

 

Stern young faces gavel-blunt, their twinned silences

sentence me as yet another militant of double-speak:

 

In order to show our love for the planet,

we wanted children who could grieve for it.

 

Emma Neale

 

 

Emma Neale is the author of six novels and six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is To the Occupant (OUP, 2019). She works as a freelance editor in Otepoti/Dunedin, where she also occasionally teaches creative writing. This year she received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award, a prize given biennially for a distinguished contribution to New Zealand poetry. She is the current editor of Landfall.