Truth to sketch a ‘reality’
Too gross for a frame. So we cannot make free with it,
Hanging it in our favourite locality
To suit the context of our lives, making it a part
Of us, like a painting we admire -
And the scene isn’t one we recognize. Now my data-points,
Stippling Nature’s canvas, don’t conspire
Deterministically against me. In fact, my green daub confirms
My freedom, for I chose Ecology,
As I chose Poetry, to be my fellow-travellers:
Pollution is not toxicology
To the romantic impulse, but a dream of laying my hands on
A sick river, and even if I could
Not exactly improvise fish to eat from my hand,
I could coax (if my data stood)
Clean water from the farm to virtually the same effect...
...Futurologists! The fruit of destiny grows on the tree
Of liberty. Freedom is my bulwark,
A foil to the world that wants to do wrong through me,
To drive me into a corner to work
The economic and social zero-option model. The image
That put her to flight and makes all
Lose dignity is like the opportunist who would lay the victim
At his feet. When riches call
The tune, the mighty puff the findings of one discipline
(Useful within its limits), so cavalier,
Until they can see their pale shadow no more in the light
Of the others, Henceforth they peer
In the self-justifying glass of determinism...and we grow
Into unwitting apologists for the pretty
Rationalizations which rub our noses in the dirt....)