By Jemma Borg
Hope for what? Do we mean a resistance to despair, as Rebecca Solnit has it? Do we mean hope for change?
I was thinking about the climate scientists I heard talking at a conference recently and one of the things that I noticed was this kind of sad resignation – they had thought they could present the facts to the world and the world would react with the urgency required.
It has not.
While that’s nonsensical to scientists, human beings of course are not ruled by reason alone. So, there’s a sense, I suppose, that we’re in a battle for hearts as well as minds. But the issue for that is that we don’t have much time, if any, and this kind of thing might take time, or a generation to work.
Seeing that facts alone aren’t shifting policy, can language, can poetry, help our deeply unsettling times? I believe we should be using all the tools at our disposal and that includes forms of visible action and resistance, as history has taught us. And things like kindness, being open, tenderness, exercising our rights to choice and so on, these are all tools too. But obviously as a poet, I do think about what poetry can do. Or language, perhaps.
One of the things poetry can do is bear witness. And witness is not just a description of what’s seen, but it shows what there is to see – and that’s a subtle but important distinction. And the second thing is it can be transformatory – Seamus Heaney saw it as a kind of poet’s moral duty to write in a way that is transformative for a reader. You shouldn’t just be mirroring despair – show the way out of the darkness.
As a former biologist, I write from what I’ve come to understand of life as a voracious, ongoing process. But if I’m thinking we may already have run out of time, passed the point of no return, what is it I’m still holding onto? What am I doing, and why?
I think about one of the major stumbling blocks that we have as humans dealing with the huge issues of climate change and climate justice – which is denial. And, actually, denial is understandable – what the facts tell us is very difficult, indeed terrifying. It’s a natural human response to want to look away, to retreat into the comfort of short-termism.
Denial is a protective psychological response. But we cannot afford denial – we must find courage. And here is where I think poetry can help – it can help us find courage. A touchstone for me is the poem ‘Muse’ by Elaine Feinstein which asks that age-old question: what can poetry do? It’s kind of powerless. And yet it protects us. How?
She says poetry strengthens ‘our fierce and obstinate centres’. So, I think, it gives us
something beyond our surrounding standard rhetoric, something that feels like home. It works, in other words, on our hearts and minds and strengthens them and does so in a positive way.
And what do I mean by positive? Poetry can get past all the kinds of barriers we set up within and between ourselves and between us and what we’ve historically called nature – that which we are embedded in. It gives us a sense of exquisite empathy.
Willow sonnet
by Jemma Borg
‘Time sifting through our fingers, a thrum of light’: sublime
elegies of the blackthorn profuse with blossoms
on bare, dark stems – April’s snow! So the humble shine.
And the willows are dawning – some come first with lanterns,
with bright cobs: filaments pollen-tipped with yellow
like phosphorus lit at the end of a match. And now the willows
come with song, their shifting song of shifting leaves
curled to the notes of light. Beech leaves at their threshold
pause – go through, go through the door? The bud?
And yet? And now? they ask. Yes, so the old may fall.
The barest stories grow to incandescence – and soften
stone, as water does. Stick a thread of willow into mud,
and it will tree. I think now of joy, not weeping.
Travel green, human heart – thou, who rustle like a willow.
Published by Whaleback Press as part of the eco-sonnet sequence June 2025.
Jemma Borg was an evolutionary geneticist and has worked in research, publishing and the
voluntary sector. Her second collection,Wilder (Pavilion, 2022), was shortlisted for the TS Eliot
Prize, was a Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry winner and included poems that won the
RSPB/Rialto Nature and Place Competition and the inaugural Ginkgo Prize. She has recently
completed a commission to write about the unique and protected national landscape where she
lives in East Sussex.