Posted in National Poetry Day 2019

National Poetry Day, Climate Truth Poem by Liz Brownlee

Happy National Poetry Day everyone! Here is my National Poetry Day Truth poem, published last month in Be the Change, Poems to Help you Save the World, Macmillan.

 

Greta Thunberg

 

When the whole world is deaf

by greed and by choice,

how do you change things

with only your voice?

 

It’s hard to be noticed,

harder to be heard,

but she stood up and spoke,

could not be deterred.

 

What made them listen?

What cut through their lies?

Not the pollution

or the fast melting ice,

 

not the experts or science,

not hunger or flood,

not the extinctions,

our hands red with blood,

 

it was her steady gaze,

on our planet, alight,

her desperate calm,

her demand, make it right.

 

It’s what we’ll recall

of her fight for our youth,

her luminous words

her courage, her truth.

 

© Liz Brownlee

Posted in Be the Change

Be the Change – Poems to Help you Save the World!

It’s out today! This is a ‘heart’ book. Written with Matt Goodfellow and Roger Stevens, this is a book that took a lot of our care and research and love of the planet to produce. It’s for those children who are worried about the things they are hearing about climate crisis, and feeling powerless. It gives them things to do to help.

There is information, there are talking points, springboards for discussion about fairness and tricky climate problems, and hopeful poems about climate successes, too. Poems to cover nearly all of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, poems about toilets, tomatoes and glitter, people, plastic, and paper, whales, weather and windmills.

Perfect for all young planet protectors!