Gordon Bottomley (1874–1948)

WHEN you destroy a blade of grass

You poison England at her roots:

Remember no man’s foot can pass

Where evermore no green life shoots.

You force the birds to wing too high

Where your unnatural vapours creep:

Surely the living rocks shall die

When birds no rightful distance keep.

You have brought down the firmament

And yet no heaven is more near;

You shape huge deeds without event,

And half-made men believe and fear.

Your worship is your furnaces,

Which, like old idols, lost obscenes,

Have molten bowels; your vision is

Machines for making more machines.

O, you are busied in the night,

Preparing destinies of rust;

Iron misused must turn to blight

And dwindle to a tetter’d crust.

The grass, forerunner of life, has gone,

But plants that spring in ruins and shards

Attend until your dream is done:

I have seen hemlock in your yards.

The generations of the worm

Know not your loads piled on their soil;

Their knotted ganglions shall wax firm

Till your strong flagstones heave and toil.

When the old hollow’d earth is crack’d,

And when, to grasp more power and feasts,

Its ores are emptied, wasted, lack’d,

The middens of your burning beasts

Shall be raked over till they yield

Last priceless slags for fashionings high,

Ploughs to wake grass in every field,

Chisels men’s hands to magnify.