Greta is known to all throughout the world

Greta is that Swedish girl
Who’s known to all throughout the world;
For every Friday, as a rule,
She takes the day off from her school.
It’s not she doesn’t want to learn;
It’s what she’s learnt gives her concern.
It’s what her physics teachers say
That fills dear Greta with dismay:

A greenhouse gas called CO₂
Is growing fast up in the blue.
The more the gas, her school books show,
The more the planet starts to glow.
The more the glow, the more the storms;
Glaciers melt as Gaia warms.
Sea-levels rise; polar bears drown;
Forests burn; the land turns brown.
Acid oceans, coral graves: behold the range
Of what’s defined as Climate Change.

All this is bad enough, I fear,
But worse to come, poor Greta dear:
The reasons for these carbon gains
Are factories, cars and aeroplanes.
The stuff we burn to fuel the ride
Will feed the flames of geocide;
And this, within a score of years,
Unless we change down several gears!

These are the facts, so she’s been told,
Facts that turn a young heart cold;
When future prospects seem so bleak
Why bother then to eat or speak?
What use training for careers
If all life ends in twenty years?

What use indeed? You might well ask,
If grownups do not do their task.
If fossil fuels are in the way
We should have banned them yesterday
If factories, cars and planes are wrong
How come the world just bumbles on?
The logic of this awful truth
Demands the sacrifice of youth.
First off, a talk with Ma and Pa:
First part of carbon is the car. . .
What do we buy? What do we eat?
How big the print beneath our feet?
How big the print to fill the sign
SCHOOL STRIKE FOR CLIMATE – that’s fine!
Raincoat buttoned, pigtails curled,
Greta steps into the world.
The young girl leaves her comfort zone
To save the climate – all alone.

All alone, that is to say,
At least the first and second day
Then others stop, with quiet pride,
To fill the sidewalk by her side
And soon her one-girl strike will end
In an untipped, exponential trend.
“Fridays for Future” – tweet by tweet –
Brings school kids out onto the street
In tens of thousands, land by land,
Alarmed, indignant, hand in hand,
They march to save the world we knew,
Threatened now by CO₂.
She is their queen, their hero now,
Their amazon, their sacred cow,
Their Greta, Greeta, Gretta small:
In word and deed she’s ten feet tall.

The media just love this story
A Joan of Arc in all her glory
A priest declares that we have seen
A successor to the Nazarean.
Politicians, VIPs,
All sorts of celebrities,
Will stand in line for hours or so
To bask within her aura’s glow.

The Pope says ciao in Peter’s Square
While Trump gets Greta’s grimmest glare
Davos, Madrid, COP 24,
Summit meetings by the score
COP 25 and then New York
Everywhere she talks the talk:
Her Asperger’s gives her the right
To see the world in black and white.
She sees it plain and tells it clear
She’s Time’s “Person of the Year”
A dozen prizes with her name
Confirm her kudos and her fame.

Now back in school, her mission done,
There’s been an update while she was gone.
One section of the physics book
Has taken on a fresher look.
A whole new chapter on the Sun
Says Global Cooling has begun.
Studies of our brightest star
Signed “Valentina Zharkova”
Show without the slightest doubt
That Global Warming’s time is out.
The role of CO₂ now is
Purely photosynthesis.
Greta sighs and sobs with grief
Or are they sighs of sheer relief?

Kevin Benn

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