After the Turbines Came

The colloidal drapes of uneasy night
Billow around the Reverend Newstead
As she treads between the glowing crosses
One last time before going into exile,
The crosses pulsing with power,
Communing with the master of the skies.
She looks across at Wyldmoor Hill Wind farm,
Sees the drone of silence
From the blades of the behemoths
Devastating the land beneath.
Dismembering gulls, bats, owls, tranquillity -- even life itself.

She recalls running over this very hill
With a neighbour’s Labrador
At her four-year-old heels,
Drawing ahead then racing back,
Jumping up and muzzle-bumping both her legs
With an exultant bark, a gleam in its eyes,
Her laughter echo-pulsing across the fields.
Newstead’s mind treks on towards the present,
Still a prisoner of times past,
Gaze locking onto the turbines,
Spindly metal monsters from a nightmare future,
The reason she has to leave Wyldmoor,
Where she hearth-lighted into the world
From a proud womb more than sixty years ago.

Her mother, still living in the farmhouse
Of a long-derelict fruit farm
She bought fifty years before,
White-haired mannequin still tending her vegetable patch
(The only live zone on the farm nowadays),
Brow ploughed with puzzlement and concern
As she struggles to understand
Why anyone would expel her only child
From everything she knows
Because of a belief in God over man.
Picking green beans, her moon-waved face
Fills with tears no-one will ever see.

A flashback floods Newstead’s brain --
The marches, the placards,
The forest of immovable villagers’ bodies
Before the coming of the turbines:
“No desecration of Wyldmoor”,
“No to whining windmills”,
“Save us from the coming blackouts”,
Read the cardboard windows, strangely opaque;
Chant the Norfolk insurgents
(Freedom fighters of the North Sea),
The new environmental rebels of East Anglia.
The Reverend Newstead joins them
One icescaped night before the
Invasion of earth-movers,
Shivering in a city of canvas, plastic and wood;
She feels the infinite torture of the villagers’ distress.

Her mind sparks back to the present
As another bat drops dead from the sky.
Secure in their insulated castles in the city,
It makes no difference to the distant overlords
That the golden crosses dug into the earth,
Shimmering with alpha-light from her dream
(She blessed them herself one balmy night),
Are blazing eagles of energy
Whilst the becalmed blades on Wyldmoor Hill
Remain unsightly abominations
On the cold, unconsecrated upland,
Anorexic engines of a futuristic hovercraft
Stalled on the Sea of Zero.
No, Reverend Newstead must be punished
Decree the masters in black robes,
Banished from her homeland,
Because she has committed heresy --
Or maybe she can merely see
Beyond mankind’s inverted science,
To bathe in the light of truth.