The UK newspaper The Guardian has kicked off a campaign called The 10:10 Climate Change Campaign in order to help reduce carbon emissions throughout the world. The newspaper invited some major British poets to contribute poems responding to the crisis. Here we present two such poems. The first poem called 2084 is by Carol Rumens, a poet from South London who has published some 14 collections of poems amongst other works. The second poem called Virgil's Bees comes from current poet laureate of Great Britain, Carol Ann Duffy.
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2084 by Carol Rumens

Paired wheels and PV panels, ponds and hives
and garden-fields (citron and silvery-green
samplers, stitched by hand) declare our ground.
We're scripture-safe in our examined lives;
for each estate, one bin, one fridge, one screen
only, daily rationing of down-loads.
That ice-bar, frilling in the distant sound,
that flood, in motion inches from the cross-roads
where we abolished run-ways and re-wound
the windmills, will be measured and contained -
the government says so. And the world will sail
over the carbon peak: we'll be in free-fall
the whole sweet way to paradise regained.

It's slow, of course. The children want to burn
anything that burns. They say we stole
the magic brand, and scraped the sun's wheel
to spark it, so shut up: it's their turn
to hit the gas, light out, ignore the brakes,
as children should. Just let us be children
they wail from blazing consoles. And we tell them,
or try to, what it was to drive that borrowed
chariot, rocketing, spiralling with its florid
machinery in a thunder of gold tyres
down, down the yellowing sky-waste. Oh infelix
Phaethon, earth grew nothing, then, but fires.
We drove death into childhood, just being children.

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Virgil's Bees by Carol Ann Duffy

Bless air's gift of sweetness, honey
from the bees, inspired by clover,
marigold, eucalyptus, thyme,
the hundred perfumes of the wind.
Bless the beekeeper

who chooses for her hives
a site near water, violet beds, no yew,
no echo. Let the light lilt, leak, green
or gold, pigment for queens,
and joy be inexplicable but there
in harmony of willowherb and stream,
of summer heat and breeze,
each bee's body
at its brilliant flower, lover-stunned,
strumming on fragrance, smitten.

For this,
let gardens grow, where beelines end,
sighing in roses, saffron blooms, buddleia;
where bees pray on their knees, sing, praise
in pear trees, plum trees; bees
are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them.
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Find all the poems and other information about The Guardian's 10:10 campaign at their website HERE.

Wow, very cool!
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