Bubble Bubble
Oil is Trouble

Along the Viking Way I walked one day,
through meadows green and hedgerows grey,
where time had stopped its weary turning
and left a church half-lost, half yearning.

A place that time forgot — its nave
stands open to the rook and starling,
the ancient stones worn smooth by centuries
of weather, silence, and the darling

press of ivy at the window frames,
the foxglove standing tall in aisles,
where once the congregation gathered,
now only butterflies for miles.

The brook runs clear beneath the willows,
its voice unchanged since Tennyson
heard it singing through these same green meadows —
but something now has come undone.

The skies above are wrong this winter,
too warm, too wet, too full of rain;
the fields that held the harvest golden
now flood with every night and again.

An ancient church beside a lost lane,
the gargoyles watching from their ledges,
while oil burns far across the oceans
and fire creeps to all its edges.

I walked back through the meadow path,
the brook now brown with sudden swell,
and thought of all that we have borrowed
from a world we cannot sell.

The church still stands, half-lost in ivy,
the foxglove still in summer sings —
but how much longer will the meadow
hold against the flood that springs?