#Robert Minhinnic

[p-isforpoetry]

Robert Minhinnick's "The Rhinoceros" performed by Michael Sheen || Climate change poems

In 2015 actors including James Franco, Ruth Wilson, Gabriel Byrne, Maxine Peake, Jeremy Irons, Kelly Macdonald and Michael Sheen read a series of 20 original poems on the theme of climate change, curated by UK poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.

A replica of pre-historic drawings showing animals (Photo by Robert Pratta/Reuters):

"The Rhinoceros" by Robert Minhinnick

On the Steel Beach

1. Look at these.

Thaw sweat. Smoke on the swale. Swarf off a swollen sea.

2. No. These. World famous footprints at low water. Nine thousand years old, they say, but who’s counting. Not me. Yet maybe I am.

3. A small man. Or woman. Outcast or outlaw, hunter, flintknapper, cook. All of these. Yes, a woman, pregnant once again, and coming home through the red mud.

4. Or maybe she was dancing. Yes, a woman, I guess, who loved to dance and paint her eyes with kohl and ochre and squat to squint at herself in some rock pool and ask “what are you?”

5. At night before she slept she would breathe her harsh hashish and tell her story behind the flames about the brine-bright animals she had scratched into the sand: her wolf, her bear, her rhinoceros.

Yes, an armoured rhino like the torrent poured golden and smoking from the blast furnace ladle, a rhino where the glacier will be

and coming out of the sun, a rhino she will picture with her goatwillowstick on the last morning she will wake.

Source: Guardian Visuals, 2015