Choose our children’s future

Give us convenience. Give us buy one get one free.

Let its life-stretching plastic wrap

divorce our food from season, place and person.

Be gratified now, and call tomorrow

the tragedy of the commons.

 

What choices does profit provide?

The shadow of an invisible hand;

the brutal ineptness of dogma?

Thrown the blame but offered no solution,

we choose an organic revolution.

 

In fields and kitchens

love the bugs, the mud, the blemish.

Cut out bankers. Buy straight from the packers,

the lettuce pickers and the IT tappers.

Treasure each ragged, reused cardboard box.

Remember what nature put leaves on for.

Denounce faster, cheaper and more,

more, more.

Breathe in together the musty, living soil.

 

Ask the difficult questions.

Admit when there are no easy answers.

Invest in hedges, not in hedge funds. Sow clover.

Tend to your crop, while loving the wild border

that only the bees will gather.

Say your life’s savings are the soil’s store of carbon

that will know no harvest,

whose return no banker will count.

Let your accountant tally butterflies and pennies.

Fear those losses, and celebrate those returns.

 

Sod the supermarkets. Form a cooperative.

Tell yourself: three times a day,

I get to vote with my fork.

Together we can achieve what felt impossible alone.

 

Leave dumb passivity in the aisle;

come, take a walk through our fields.

Take a seat at our table. Shake

the hand that feeds you, and taste

that morning’s harvest at its prime.

Let the planes pass overhead, laden with

strawberries and asparagus in winter.

Swear allegiance to the seasons;

to cabbage, squash and beetroot.

 

Dare to hope, to trust your fellow,

to choose our children’s future.