My dreams

Gaby Sambuccetti

I’m so done with people calling us dreamers 
because of everything we have done
right.

We are facing so many issues:
cutting down trees
and emissions
or both?

We are eating animal parts 
while filling newspapers with blank faces
-anonymous, but always the same.

Our waste is made of rivers;
desert is not the Sahara anymore, 
it is inside our veins. 

There is a dry hot breeze in our throats, 
but it is disappearing slowly:
and science cannot cope
with our disaster.

One day, dreaming about the right thing 
will be so humiliating 
that they won’t call us dreamers,
They will look for new ways to torture us.

One day closing our eyes will be illegal,
there will be nowhere else to go. 
Even with our eyes closed.

We will look as a new Christ,
trying to move forward from 
our splintered wooden cross.

The blood will not fall 
from a crown of thorns.
as they show off this prize.

Dreaming will break through our hands as golden screws.

Something invisible will be poured,

and who will be left to witness. 

The Science

Some of the current environmental issues we are facing include climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and global warming, among many others. Even though different experts have already stated that these issues will not improve unless we take urgent action, most people still choose to ignore them, while stigmatising the ones who take direct action. They are considered ‘dreamers’ who think the world could be better and are just not realistic, as if these issues were not urgent and necessary after all. I believe that, in some ways, everyone relies on science. But science (and its many failures) depends on nature as well. 

The Poet

Gaby Sambuccetti is an Argentine-born, UK-based writer. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Brunel University (London) and she is a Latin American & Spanish Literature teacher. She is the founder & managing director of a magazine & podcast called La Ninfa Eco (UK) with a team of writers & academics from Europe, the UK & Latin America. She has performed in different countries and her books, reviews, and collaborations appear in different magazines, anthologies and literary projects from Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Germany, Bolivia, the US, Mexico, Chile, Italia, Spain, Bangladesh, India, Russia & the UK.

Next poem: On the Extraction of a Wisdom Tooth by Simon Williams