Having at last arrived in a decade with a proper name, let’s see if the powers that be can arrive at any version of political and environmental sanity, although It’s already kicking off in a fairly non-positive way.
Here’s a hopeful poem for 2020.
Toad
Stop looking like a purse. How could a purse
squeeze under the rickety door and sit,
full of satisfaction, in a man’s house?
You clamber towards me on your four corners –
right hand, left foot, left hand, right foot.
I love you for being a toad,
for crawling like a Japanese wrestler,
and for not being frightened.
I put you in my purse hand, not shutting it,
and set you down outside directly under
every star.
A jewel in your head? Toad,
you’ve put one in mine,
a tiny radiance in a dark place.
Norman McCaig
from The Map and the Clock, A Laureate’s Choice of the Poetry of Britain and Ireland., ed. Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke, Faber and Faber 2016.