Table of Contents
Far out at sea
The fox outside
Barks harshly
A cough and a scream
Rolled into one
A bit of wild outside
Roaming through our gardens
And his cry tears through the night
Leaves me wide awake
In darkness, in this room, this house
Where I must stay where I am safe
Cocooned in walls, my blanket heavy
And my thoughts swirling
For a while we were suspended
Like a comic book figure over the abyss
But the fall will come
I can see now that it will
And that everything will change
Nothing can stay as it was
We must morph and adapt
And find new ways to navigate the world
When we’re allowed to leave this safety net
That’s pulling close across our soft throats
The more we thrash in it, like fish, slippery
In their net, on the heaving hulk of a boat
Far out at sea.
Tamara von Werthern is an award-winning playwright based in Hackney.
You can read more about the success of her dystopian short film, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, here.
Her play The White Bike, and climate change book Letters to the Earth, featuring her contribution, are available at Pages of Hackney bookshop on Lower Clapton Road, which is currently closed but still selling book tokens.
