15th October 2020
You say you’ve never seen a red pill.
But we have all seen red pills, plenty of them:
The fact is, you have come across so many recently
That you’ve stopped noticing them.
Because every time it rains hard these days
The chances are, without travelling far
You’ll find red pills in Pembrokeshire.
Indeed whenever there’s a sou’western drencher
A nearby inlet, we all know which,
Gets flash-flooded with churning mud.
A red pill:
No poison in itself, as a stranger to Wales might suppose;
But something poisoned, an innocent place betrayed.
A blameless sea inlet, stained if not choked dense as oil paint
With field-swilled soil:
All the goodness of older, wiser agriculture
Flushed away by persistent couldn’t-care-less
About either local nature or our climate.
Pills as you normally think about them
Are supposed to cure, at least alleviate symptoms;
But all these Western pills of ours
Present the diagnosis of a county’s sickness.
Meanwhile please don’t go thinking
That what the land loses, the sea gains:
Our tidal brackwaters don’t want, can’t benefit from
That choking washdown in its aggressive soup
Of plant-forcing chemistries
And high-intensity effluent.
Those dull clogging spreads
The sea’s twice-daily flood strands all across
The upper flats of once-pastured little havens
Are surely all the evidence you need
That these sheltered inlets cannot cope
And need protection now.
Pills should heartily breathe with constant tumbles
Of scattered seaweed,
Twigs and branches,
Summersend reeds and scrubland seeds,
Crab shells, clean sand and sifty life-rich sea sediments,
Fry of flatfish fast-dashing
Under myriad mirrorflash ripples…
Now, instead, sulphurous mats of stagnancy,
Not just seen but smelt as well:
Each an obstacle to hungry shorebirds,
Denying oxygen to the creatures they seek.
And so – behold, an economic triumph:
The unthrive of yet another priceless habitat,
Suffocated by our end-of-rainbow obsession
With short-term profits.
© Christopher Jessop 2020