I'm indebted to www.phuketwan.com for the photo for this month's sonnet. It rewards careful inspection.

Tsunamis happen centuries apart,
Too long for any memory to survive
Of how the sea retreats before they start­ –
So fast that fish are picked up still alive.
If memory then could offer us no aid,
Today we’re surely better placed to warn,
To notify the errors that we made
To our descendants who are not yet born.
But have we learned the lessons of the past?
Are plans in place to show them where to go?
Or when they see the ocean sinking fast
Will they, as we did, stop to watch the show?
The horn of the loudspeaker’s blocked by vines;
And rust grows on the muster-station signs.

Gosh. No posts on my blog for over a year. Now it is resurrected in a slightly different form: New for 2020 it's...a sonnet a month. This will last for as long as I can manage. To kick things off and set the tone for what might follow, here's one about belching cows.

To Burp is Human; to Eructate, Bovine
To dairy cows the news comes with a thud,
Providing much for them to ruminate:
For ages they have blithely chewed the cud,
Yet now we lay our problems at their gate.
While human halitosis can spell death
To moments of romance when love is near,
At least when we exhale our torrid breath
It’s not death for the actual atmosphere.
Across our verdant meadows cows may range,
Dispensing methane as they puff and wheeze,
Yet we can’t sense the climate or its change
In air-conned delis where we buy our cheese.
Bucolic pleasures, vital to our past,
When claimed by hordes of humans cannot last.