Abandoned Fields

We are bound across the quaking bog

By the mauve purgatory of heathers

And the dry stone-wall weathering

Of stonechats grinding out of fog.

Bound across all knowable time

By the fidgeting of rushes

Bearding the gaping sphagnum pool, the luscious

Fruit of the neglected crime.

I too fear the land

And its unyielding womb,

Dread it like the accursed tomb

Of a god that abandoned.

I think I primarily had in mind the Ceide Fields when I wrote this (a short piece of mine on this extraordinary archeological site here).  This is one from my unpublishable poem series which includes Elm Leaves, Tritych, Compassion, and I like the Way a Hand. 

The Ethical Arrogance of Vegetarianism and other Scolding Insights from Pleistocene Living

One of my first, perhaps not so bright, solutions to Irish environmental problems was to relocate all the peoples of Ireland west of the Shannon River, and restrict access to that rewilding environment only to those with a Bowie knife and a willingness to hunt for their food.  Not long after this musing of mine, a small clan of Irish broadcasters spent time in Connemara roughing it, and claimed, to national outrage, that they had slaughtered a lamb to survive (it is referred to in Ireland as the Lambo incident).  However, the idea that our abandoning, ten thousand years ago, of the primitive hunter-gatherer (H-G) lifestyle was unfortunate for ourselves and for the environment has been perennially part of environmental mainstream thought (versions run from at least Rousseau to David Abram).  The arguments were most forcefully articulated by the late Paul Shepard, an environmental writer and professor.  In this post I give a sketch of his argument on behalf of a renewal of the Pleistocene human in which he claims that that “secret person is undamaged in each of us and may be called forth by the most ordinary acts of life.”[1]

In his preface to The Only World We’ve Got a collection published in 1996, the year Paul Shepard died, we get a succinct overview of where this interdisciplinary environmental thinker’s work brought him.[2]  Or rather one might quip “to when” his thought brought him, for he was infamously nostalgic for Pleistocene times, dismissing the achievements of agriculture tartly in essays entitled Ten Thousand Years of Crisis, The Domesticators and so forth.