DISASTER FILM

there is no poetry in a flaming
world. there is no poetry in historic
nightmares. in the raging fire, there
is no poetry. welcome to the future.
here, there are no epiphanies—
only long nights and a hollow heat
wave that will never matter— I mean
poor countries waiting for a salvation
that will never come. what did we learn?
did home become better? in the substantive
ferocity of the devastation, we lost our
names—my mother’s green lungs and clear
streams. in the case of flash floods and
tearful survivors: watch out, all climate
refugees are black (as usual). the trunks
of mangled trees still smolders. there
is no spotter plane that tutelage us—
we are all abandoned like hive boxes
in an empty field. so much kindling on
the forest floors. well, the crises seem
tragic and in one unbroken chain. miles
away from home, I still see an opaque
wall of haze over the sea.

FOREST MUSEUM

this June, like the rest of the world,
the wildfire swallowed my father’s
horse farm and gave us carcass to
recalled home by. the sky glows red
& there is no word to call the ash raining
from our dreams like sinister confetti.
who wants to have their vacation on a
scorched ground? last night, my father
stared in horror as the flames headed
down the mountainside towards the cathedral.
& my mother’s mouth absorbed in memory
thought of the other children she is leaving
behind— suddenly there he was— our dog
jimmy, petrified over the sound of scorched
trees & acrid smoke. everyone wants to
tell me how to live correctly—something
created to read from dying hope to
beautiful choices. but the necessary part
of the earth still lies barren. I mean to say
the cycle is unbroken, the ruin refusing
to escape its frame. once in my addiction, 
I read of a little child, that’s me, listening
for the first time the wrath of cyclones,
for the first time in the sense of fear.

CYCLONE IDAI

Another night of strong winds
and I can feel the bracing inside
our lily-livered heart; where I come

from, the future is my father’s body
dancing alone in the dark. All the
understory smashed for a country

full of smoke stacks and dreary sky.
Like famine: my sister wilted to half
of her size lies bedridden in the mud-

brick shack. If it comes to a personal
retribution against indifference, I have
seen the ocean in our streets. In the

panic of hope we can only be refugees—
children spilled out of language, with the
sludge of broken dams—where home

worth eight times its weight in pristine
vegetation, is now extinct.

CLIMATE DAMAGES

how horrible & possible it is here.
there is no poetry in drought—
here the earth will always be flame.
the trees nailed to the narrative
of a prolonged heatwave.

slow jet stream—hanging from the air
with the bluntest gum in its throat.
the fire season growing even wilder
on the forest floors down the coast.

do you see? dead storks and a flaming
debris raining down on the village.
it was reported that not even one firefighting
plane was sent. a howl at the pine cones
& the beehives that might at any point fall

on our heads. well, still under the red glow
of an orange sky and something that someone
mumbled nightmarish summer. in the dark times
of climate anxieties, will there also be garlic
cloves? in the dark times of climate anxieties,
will there also be singing?

HEA(R)T PUMP COHORT PERFORMANCE

I had in mind that we would build a HEA(R)T PUMP during the project, so this was a matter of trying out and discussing ideas. I felt that the process was made particularly productive by the simple act of documenting the performance on both video and audio. The separate audio recording of our collective HEA(R)T PUMP whooshing is one of the things that makes the video worth keeping.

Words and drawing by Kate Clayton
Performance concept by Kate Clayton
Performed by Kate Clayton, David Sherry, Rory Green and Sean Hall
Filmed and edited by Sean Hall
Sound by Rory Green

THE BUILD

INTERACTIONS

PERFORMANCE

STRANGE FUTURE

after Hayden Carruth

Unlike hope, which tricks us with future expectations,
My daughter insists we can build the world around us

Again, if we choose— any tree can become a ladder
And my heart begins to dream again. Is it memory,

If I stand by a riverside full of thrash and plastic?
Once someone told me I inherited my mother’s heart.

When I love, I press every moment like a garlic clove.
I mean my country is changing. How tricky this makes

The word drought. And yet, the earth feels hotter today.
When I say, I miss home, what I mean is I am filled with

Dread. I doubt if this cyclone can distinguish my mother’s
Poor shelter. Famine comes quietly, and I sieve through

The long silence for the songs my grandmother taught me
While attempting to describe the many days of low rainfall—

Here, the green pastures have become dust, carcasses
Of goats and sheep line the roadsides. All climate refugees

Are pastoralist, yet the reverse is false. There has to be
A way to save this tilting earth without sacrificing myself

Or my lovelies to cholera. Nothing restores the sense of loss
Less ambiguously than the feelings in which something is

At stake. Do you think the earth will ever achieve healing?
What about home? There is too much smog. I’m awake,

Its murky outside it must be the sandstorm. The terrible
Pangs that flow down from the names of our transgression.

It reminds me of everything we failed to do and what I do
Know is there is no imaginary future, if we continue to

Stand on the same stepladder every few years and swap
Around reduced emissions.

Poetry by Ojo Taiye

FIRE COUNTRY

Forgive me I am not able to think about
our future. If I could find clarity but I cannot—
Our house is on fire [1]. And yet, the stupid world
Still gathers all its argument for polite emission.
I can’t sleep. This is the precipice I fear the most—
We are less than twelve years away from not being
Able to undo our mistakes [2] — that irreversible decision
To upend nature for something vain like economic
Growth and power. Still I am willing to swim in cliché
every time I tell you that cattle as a species are already
dying— because home is a list of things I keep from
my only son. There is a cyclone here, somewhere,
floating in the stirred wind. Another dry rain season in
four years, and I don’t know how to modulate the changing
temperatures or the increasing variability, how to sleep
through another famine. Tonight, the air outside, is as
heavy as the stench of dead animals, and I cut home in
half—and my lungs filled up to choking with a white
stinging smoke of bushfires. To this evening, I return
and a village of herders eat tamarind fruits mixed with
clay. Let the poet ease the rain in my mouth. There is
hunger, and there is malnutrition, and they creep on us,
even if we are not the one transversing this bridge.

1 after Greta Thunberg

2 According to the IPCC

TILTING EARTH

after Jane Lovell

in the language of a songbird,
I pray with a heart, full of thorns,
in a meadow, full of lean lowing.

in the screaming confession of starlings,
drought & malnutrition are few things
flaming my gullet & my body hums

like a coffee bean. I know what I’ve heard
about hunger or the documentary I’ve watched
about children rocking the cup of want between

their blistering fingers. what is it about global
warming that plunges a body into despair?
in a small domed shelter of wood & cloth,

a poor brown girl describes what feels like panic—
the world’s misfortune heavy on her shoulders.
the flood didn’t kill her little brother, cholera did.

what would I say I have learned? Let me change
the question: What paints the world into one kind
of pain from belowground? It easy to realize that

we are not ignorant of the fact that coal mining
is ruin, fossil fuel is deathtrap, when it is true, that
the kind of future my mother continues to hear

after she is dead is the kind ruined by desires—
economic growth— the resultant letter of our eviction,
the terrible pain that flows down through greed.

There is guilt in the world. The wind of inaction.
It blows past the makeshift shelters on rock-hard
dust bowl of barren land outside villages stalked

by the threat of desolation. The night shines
through me and I open my note pad to rhyme.
I research tax policies that favor solar and wind

energy investment. It doesn’t take long and I
wrote energy transition is a matter of vision and
leadership. I call out four letter words beginning

with hope. This is how we save the future—end
coal extraction and mining, stop the funding,
and invest in renewables.

Poetry by Ojo Taiye

POST-APOCALYPTIC DREAMS

when I think of the future,
instead of words I cannot say
I want to say sorry to the blue sky
as if it were a child of my own mother.
what we call floods: bushfires elsewhere
binds my wrist to the tense present in
everything is broken, everything is lost.
never would I have known that the world
given to us curls into my body like burned
end tables abandoned in empty fields.
all heat-strokes are predominantly
apocalyptic. at what point, good reader,
does a heat dome become a landscape
riddled with buckled roads and steaming
drawbridges? the trees shudder and my
worried sister lifts up her eyes upward—
she points at the night sky—at the meteors
that once slashed across the heavens with
fiery intensity but only pulse faintly
through the muck.

TIPPING POINTS

this poem will convince more
than one once, of few moments,

in this land, without a home,
that is childhood, was childhood.

tell me we are wrong—I cross the
street this morning, where yesterday

another man, committed suicide,
ruined by crop failure. the leaves are

turning swarthy in their dying. when
was the rain enough? I know i have

read before but have no memory of
ever reading, that the heat is a growing

tsunami & in its flame, we remember
our collective sins.

PERFORMANCE SCULPTURES

Developing the ‘Street Performance’ as a prop for conversations, not only about the artwork but more whatever the passer-by wants to talk about. Many times the art work directs a conversation towards the social, society and the political. Hopefully a successful work translates literally for the audience as they see it, and then conceptually when the viewer thinks about the actions and relationships. Giving people the ‘Graph Line of Temperature Increase’ like a Frans West sculptural object to hold and make sense of. Connecting with people through these kinds of works is the best.

Words, drawings, and sculptures by David Sherry
'Performance Sculptures’ filmed and edited by Sean Hall
Sound Work by Rory Green

THE PINEAPPLE

I presented a pineapple on a platter. The pineapple I’d come across in one of David Sherry’s drawings [pictured right]. That is, a fruit grown in the tropics, transported to the UK, and often left to rot in a UK kitchen. How does one justify the transport cost and the fossil fuel expended? I talked about how the pineapple had been greatly valued in Victorian times, that it had been so revered that families had been able to rent them out - not for eating, but to be admired - at a dinner. Whereas now pineapples can be bought for a pound at a supermarket. And I invited passers by to write a single word on a flag, and to stick the flag into the pineapple, nature’s bountiful gift from the tropics.

Text by Kate Clayton
Drawing by David Sherry
Photos by Cohort Members

PERSONAL PROTEST

Protest is your right. You don’t have to join a group, go on a march or stick your hands to the ground if you don’t want to. Anything can be a protest. Everything may need a protest. Everyone can be a protester? A protest can be a creative act that is non-violent. You may not have an agenda or a clear philosophy but that should not stop you from making your own personal protest. Protest about nothing and protest about protests.

Words and drawing by David Sherry
Performance Concept by David Sherry
Performed by David Sherry, Kate Clayton, Rory Green and Sean Hall
Filmed and edited by Sean Hall
Sound by Rory Green

IN THE SMALL HAND OF TIME

after Tim Hollo

Somewhere in another country, an old man looks up
quietly at the empty sky. In my dreams,
my sister talks
animatedly with a family
of pine cones.

After months,
of breathing in the ghosts of gum trees,
of koalas & cockatoos,

how could we deny that we’re not all connected?
battered by fire, dust, floods and hail,
how could we pretend `
we’re not completely
reliant on the natural
world?

In my mouth the seasons of regret— struggling
with how to get on with post pandemic life while,
just down the road, another massive fire

trickles and putters, clearing underbrush,
doing what they
should.

In my shadow, my sister falls into the abyss of hunger—
our inertia rushing into my veins.

What terror lies in
climate change?
I touch them, my sister’s

childhood longings. What is devoured stays silent in my hand.
Beside the village, I watch herders,

gather by the last meal of dried bean leaves,
handful by handful, they chew the longer

parts of hope, wishing for nothing but rain—
its sprinkle. Like
I used to complain, for so long,
there are no pastures,

no rainfall, only dry riverbed
& lean cows
tied to rain-starved trees.

Poetry by Ojo Taiye

JULY MORNING

in my favorite fantasy,
i want to sit sinless in my dream

for sparrows. the sun sets & i look
out of the window of my heart—

and everything I love is made from
a birch tree. lord, I am terrified

of swallowing an apple branch.
i know it's not always about anguish.

everything changes and i have learned
the sky forgives. there are whole days

I want to leap into the yellow silk morning,
where i left you. it's no surprise that love

has nothing to do with climate change,
air density or science.

UP THE SLOPES OF MOUNT PARNITHA

It’s evening and in my father’s compound,
another zebu is dying. The growing constellation
of uncertainty jostling humanity claims my legs.

Maybe I am making too much of the way my daughter
closes her eyes and dreams of the world swept away,
gone in a pool of waves or how my mother’s sigh falls

against my chest as if to say: my darling Earth, with
what tangible balm can I nurse you? And yet, I’ll admit
that I know: the image of a bright tiomena blooming

on my mother’s shed. I am ashamed to say it—
the fires germinate and spread and we’ve forgotten
our duty. Soon enough, the smoke will prick—

a dreadful caption proclaiming apocalypse. What is
a future with no acres of pine trees to cover a seaside
settlement? What stands between us and renewal?

Of guiltiness I was never ashamed. See, there is no rain,
and the cactus withers. If reforestations were feasible,
wouldn’t it take at least forty years to pulse?

Sometimes we walk into the future with the wrong end
of the premonition. How do we bring back the glossy
black cockatoo who couldn’t speak; birds lost in fire,

smoke and blaze. Where do we turn to, knowing the
official message of safety’s commissioner— flight—
points to an olive’s tree flinders or its scarred trunk?

[The text for the first poem of the film, Climate Apartheid, can be found above]

OUTSIDE THE TREES FLAME

after the bushfire in Australia

the air keeps its dense shape.
surely drought & bushfire have the same face.
I can barely remember the scent of her hands:
my sister, her infant voice humming my name
from my father’s burning porch. it’s taken
awhile for me to admit, humanity ended
a long time ago but no one noticed.
I looked out the window & saw her
from behind— the koala, the way she
flung her forelimbs like she was desperate,
& being eaten by a visible predator.
& did I tell you yet, that my country is a menacing
cocktail of high temperatures & gusty wind.
in the silence of our house, hidden by shutters,
I remember all the beautiful things
suffocated by fumes. I remember thinking
our policymakers were kind but knowing
they were mean. I remember thinking
our PM was sober but knowing he only speaks
of green eternal economic growth. sometimes
I am in a raging battle with my country.
I can’t stop thinking the human significance
of environmental policies & then I remember
they are cherry bombs thrown into the crowd,
before it’s divvied among the ghettoes of time
& air. this way, I mean to tell you, I am tired of
the circumstance of being here, waiting on the
corner for a future mirage.

Poetry and Reading by Ojo Taiye / Filmed and Edited by Sean Hall / Sound by Rory Green

2015 PARIS AGREEMENT

climate refugee is not poetic writing about climate refugee is not poetic.
this sole word weighs heavy as my father’s name. & sleepless worry folds
a village of herders, the way fire ravages the wildflowers. my little sister,
writes a note she hides beside her bed in the shack. it begins, dear El Nino.

another word for climate refugee is worry. another word for worry is food ration.
another word for malnutrition is cholera. & sometimes my sister is both. my blood
barreled through my body until there is a border on her back— child labor.
which is to say sometimes a girl’s body is a dove’s neck.

it’s April & my brother has spent a year drinking from test tubes. if the past is just 
a parable for the future, then staying alive should be easier— a dainty morsel falling
from our metallic mouth—the land and everything in it in full obedience to drought
and windstorms. there is no song here, only dry wells and dead cattle.

this heatwave, mother of our circling, the name we gave to the far side of the horizon—
sealed with bruises. i am running back & forth between the house of silence & the house
of greed shouting over & over with ink-stained fingers: isn’t it only sensible to pull
the emergency break? shouldn’t we abandon this dirty energy for now?

climate refugee is not poetic is the small brightness of my mother’s shed. her arms filled
with goat milk, each dark step of the way home. & my father is singing to his six-year old
daughter, thick with longing. the forecast on the radio claimed it will rain, it didn’t.
for so long i wanted to give the world my eyes—