Nature Is Healing
“If humans are the virus, pandemic is the cure.”
I think capitalism is the virus. We humans are still here.
– Naomi Klein
It constructs membranes
between its most powerful organs,
filters pathogens hidden in boats.
It despatches great white teethy T-
Cells to hunt and envelop, scratch at
doors, demand entry to feast.
When it sees how the waters flow
thick with blooms of blue masks,
it gobbles them in its throat’s wattled
pouch: you can see how they
wriggle down its gullet,
sluiced into acid inner seas.
When the Healing slows, it comes
knock-knocking, firmer now; has saved
the DNA addresses, VPNs, of all those
who question its motives. Nature
rewrites headlines identified as un-
Natural; closes down voices deemed
unproductive. You cannot argue with
Nature, it says. It’s only Natural,
go the posters. Along motorways’
old arteries, it releases supercharged
rhinoceros which crush the filthy fleeing
trucks. Its cities bloom in radiant shrooms.
It has a plan and it involves you. Nature knows
your full name, your value to this green-
blue scab that it has finally picked.
Caleb Parkin was Bristol City Poet 2020 – 22. He tutors and mentors widely, has published three pamphlets and a collection, This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches 2021, longlisted Laurel Prize). He holds an MSc Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes; from 2023 he’s a practice-as-research PhD candidate at University of Exeter.