For the women…Saving the Arctic by Jay Ramsay

The very thought of it

could make your palms sweat.

Sheer dizzying ascent of glittering hot glass ice!

Scaling it, this monument

spire of spires

bared under a Godless sky

pyramid of Mammon

where only corporations rule…Pharoahic

summit sheared off like a knife

tip snapped to skeletal scaffolding…

And six women with rucksacks, in helmets

six spunky angels faithful to a higher cause

than passive acceptance, tailing each other

feeding back thin white rope

to just over a thousand feet—

Passing a gobsmacked windowcleaner

and a black waitress at the 30th floor

poised with her tray in her hand, as if frozen

Not even the police dare intervene

they’re way beyond—

only monitored by their transport counterpart

via telescope, perhaps?

As they inch towards the stars

To unfurl the highest banner in the world

to shame Shell free of its rationalizations,

its lying polite business-speak

its pretend-God-horizon

where all is harmless and under control

(as it is secretly planned)

cold as the Arctic itself

whitewashed and snowblind

so all they can do is climb, and keep climbing

(no way back down)

the impossible mountain of the untransformed world

on the edge of our fragmented time

towering over all three offices far below

and the trains, you tweet, ‘like electric worms’

and the millions of us in London’s bloodstream

and every where this image is seen in

that want a future we can believe in

but have less and less idea where to look

(other than at each other—)

without closing our eyes

could raise them now

to what we can be

when we reach again for the sky.