So excited to announce that my poem ‘When the Janus-faced ripple beckons’ has been selected as a Highly Commended piece in the Shepton Snowdrops Poetry Festival. Recently we’ve been facing one of our greatest fears come to life- that it that global warming is now almost unstoppable. Almost. We’ve had forest fires and hurricanes and blizzards and tsunamis all over the world because of climate change, and it’s only going to get worse. My poem was inspired by the horrifying news we seem to hear on the television almost every day- by the stories of mothers and children enduring such brutal hardships. Yet I know the lure of nature, of the waves and the sea, and so my poem was about the multi-faceted nature of the waves. Always tossing and turning and never stopping.
When the Janus Faced Ripple beckons.
Perhaps you hear the noise.
It started softly
But now it’s loud. Demanding your attention.
A soft hum, now a igneous roar.
It’s the sound of
Buildings collapsing bricks falling pavements cracking.
And the noise doesn’t stop
Even when you hear a child’s desperate wail and
See a mother’s hand. Trembling shaking shivering
Can we not trust the Earth under our feet anymore?
It grows louder.
Waves
Crashing tumbling rolling into one another.
It looks beautiful in a postcard.
And then the waves recede,
Deceiving manipulating misleading.
Because now they come
In an endless wall getting
Higher and higher.
And the nightmare will never leave you. You will always
Be haunted by glimpses of the tiny
Helpless hand, swallowed.
But. You find yourself drawn to the
Shore once again,
To the rustle of the sand. To the shells hiding life.
To the hum of the waves.
Because somehow
The soft hum beckons.
Perhaps you hear the noise too.
Avishi Gurnani 
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