Dear editor,
I wonder if you’d publish this sonnet to Teddy in The Ecologist.
Best wishes,
Robert Prescott-Allen
British Columbia
Canada
Teddy (Edward Goldsmith 1928-2009)
You were Don Quixote astride your horse,
I donkey Sancho. And all your windmills,
no nutty error of knight errantry,
but grim machine: turbines that stop the course
of streams, drown lives, charge rising power bills;
ark-wreckers, grinding to monotony
corals and bees, dolphins and orchid blooms;
fast food mills, rendering the fat of the land
down to land of the fat, making a pale
spectre of the feast; glooms, warped anti-looms,
reweaving the human tapestry, strand
by rainbow strand, into a sackcloth veil.
You battled them with zest; but for your say
eschewed the Art of War and wrote The Way.
Robert Prescott-Allen
