Young writers on climate crisis

To mark World Environment Day this year, Dunedin UNESCO City of Literature released The Heat is On: Young Writers on the Climate Crisis, a free digital anthology of creative writing about the climate crisis.
 
Showcasing writers under 20 from Cities of Literature, the anthology presents 15 powerful pieces in first languages and in English.
 
Readers are welcomed by the waiata Huia te aroha, written by He Waka Kotuia and performed against the coastal backdrop of Otakou Marae.
 
Here we republish two of the pieces from the anthology.

 

The Tree 

By ISOBEL CLARKE

The Young Tree by Isobel Clarke.
The Young Tree by Isobel Clarke.

Ten years ago, a girl planted a tree. She and her grandma walked through long grass, clutching a conker seed in their clasped hands. They dug a hole in the fine, lush earth and placed the conker inside. Grandma covered the hole and the girl patted it three times for luck. They left.

On the first year they returned, their tree was two feet tall. It was healthy, well placed. They gave it water and left, hand in hand.

On the second year they returned, the tree had barely grown. It was swelteringly hot outside. The soil was bone dry. They tipped buckets of water onto the soil, knowing it would only last a couple of hours. In worried silence, they trooped home.

On the third year they returned, the tree was more than a metre tall. But the forests around it were not. Sawdust and burnt stumps lay in their place. The tree had not been hit. This had been a controlled fire. They walked home, tears rolling down the little girl’s cheeks.

On the fourth year they did not come. Grandma was gone, and with her, the girl’s home.

Year five. No one was there for the tree. It willed the girl to come. The climate was changing. It needed to say goodbye.

2 years pass ...

On the eighth year, an eighteen-year-old, almost unrecognisable young woman makes her way to the tree. She has been through so much, lost so much. She thought perhaps if she came here, she could say goodbye to her past, move on.

There is no way she can do that now.

She is not standing in the lush field surrounded by glorious forests that she was eight years ago. No. This is a wasteland. A dry, dead wasteland. The smell of smoke and devastation lurks forebodingly in the thick air. Plastic wrappers sweep past her ankles, taunting her, teasing her. All your fault! They seem to be screaming at her. All your fault!

She’s running now, curly brown hair flying behind her. Her hazel eyes are searching, scanning. “Please, please,” she whispers. But now she’s seen it and she wishes she hadn’t.

A shrivelled, 2 metre tall tree. The branches creak in the dusty wind. A plastic bag is caught up in the leaves that remain, and a dead crow lies at its feet. How, how can it be so ... dead when they planted it with so much love? The girl kneels at the bottom of the tree and wraps her arms around it. “I’m so sorry ...” she whispers. “I’m so, so sorry.”

She returns as much as she can after that, but nothing she does helps. No water is enough to save the tree, no love enough to cure it. Two years and it’s dead, nothing but a reminder of what lay there ten years before.

Lying in bed that night, the young woman tosses and turns. She is dripping with guilt that her own race is responsible for this. There is only one thing she can do.

Fight for her planet.

Isobel Clarke was born in Edinburgh in 2009. She still lives there with her mum, dad, sister and cat Zeus. In her free time she likes to read, draw, write and run. After school she would love to get a book published and travel around the world; Nepal and Japan are at the top of her list.
 

Apocalypse!

By ZINNIA HANSEN

Spring

open window. smells of honey.
can’t breathe. too beautiful.
the year dies.
from the enclave.
spring wind. snatches. loose pages.
airs-out. sweaty armpits.
flowers bloom.
time skips. around a maypole.
ribbons crisscrossed. wound tight.
life. a fluttering thing.
voluminous. paper chrysanthemum.
under the rain.
it has begun. the dust.
daisies have opened. stopped opening.
rhythmless. no rain.

Summer

the landscape is
naked in the summer,
thirsty for the rain
that will dull
its burning contours,
for the snow
that will soothe the bare
throbbing spine
of its mountains.
the trees are the parched
green of a migraine.
perched on
the sandy cliffs,
they stare at the sound
like a woman stares
at her own breasts

Fall

I want to wear your skin
as a christening gown,
she told me one night,
while we set each other on fire,
while our petals, our leaves,
our thorns, and things
fell to the floor.
I thought the point of a baptism
was to make yourself clean.
no, it’s to make yourself holy.
there’s a difference.
we won’t have any skin
after tonight. we’ll never be able
to wash off the red.
last September, I started writing
my own apocalypse,
because my lover asked me
a pitched question:
what’s the point of writing
while the world ripens and dies.
it’s autumn again,
but the hills are still burning.
and even though it rained yesterday,
the maples turned yellow
in a brown haze.
we’ve stopped talking about it.
instead, we wait till it’s dark
and love each other.

Zinnia Hansen is a poet and essayist from the Pacific Northwest. She is a first year student at the University of Washington, studying linguistics. She is the 2021-2022 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate.

Her work has been published in various magazines and online publications, including the Blue Marble Review, Young Poets Network, and Ice Lolly Review.

She was a finalist in the New York Times Personal Narrative Contest and part of the Hugo House Young Poets Cohort.

She is in the process of writing a book, of amassing an archive of things she holds holy, which will be published June 2022.

 

The anthology

The Heat Is On: Young Writers on the Climate Crisis is available at www.cityofliterature.co.nz/news, in the ‘‘latest happenings’’ section.