By Kaye Berry

The wind used to sing through the rushes, a song that was older than time,
It whispered in valleys and bushes, and danced through the moss and the lime.
But the rhythm is changing and jagged, the bold song is starting to fade,
The skyline is broken and ragged, sliced through by the turn of the blade.

They say that the future is calling, that power must flow from the steep,
But I see the ancient rocks falling, awakening the hills from their sleep.
The roads are gouged wide in the bracken, concrete veins where the peat used to bleed.
The pace of the change does not slacken, to feed an insatiable greed.

And what will we say to our children? When the last of the wild places die?
When the kites are gone from the hilltops, and the red lights are blinking on high.
They will walk where the shadows are spinning, beneath the white giants that roar,
They won’t know the world that’s beginning, or the silence that lived here before.

We are selling their birthright for wattage, trading beauty for structure and span,
Turning wildness to industrial desert, according to someone’s grand plan.
They will never know mists on the heather, without seeing turbines in view.
Or how sky and the earth bound together, before machines came and cut them right through.

So mourn for the heavy trucks rolling, and mourn for the landscape they sever,
For the bell of the valley is tolling, and the wild is departing forever.
We leave them the wires and the gratings, a horizon of wide blade and grey.
While the ghosts of the old gods are waiting, for the beauty we traded away.

January 2006