Bats or Newts? A Lament

Words: Jon Swales
Music: Sad Emotional Piano- Copyright Free Music via YouTube 

“Bats or great crested newts?”

“Neither, because I want growth,” Rachel Reeves. The Times Interview- Quick Fire Questions

——-

‘Bats or Great Crested Newts?’

‘Neither,

because I want growth.’

And the earth exhales,

a long, low breath,

threaded with dust and diesel.

Once, we were called to tend and keep,

to walk with care

among the creatures of feather and scale,

but now we measure worth

in units of concrete and steel.

The hum of engines drowns out

the song of the land.

Economic growth has become god,

its temples rising in glass and stone,

its gospel preached in numbers

that do not bleed or bloom.

The rivers hold their tongues,

the forests lean away,

and the bats,

those ancient scribes of dusk,

write their farewell

against a sky that forgets.

‘Neither,

because I want growth.’

Beneath the tarmac skin of the world,

the great crested newts wait,

pressed into the damp earth,

their stories unravelled

by a people who no longer listen.

They were here before us,

in the time when the land

was a gift, not a resource.

‘Neither,

because I want growth.’

But the wild ones know.

They whisper of a garden,

a covenant,

a calling shaped from soil and breath.

We were dust once,

and to dust we shall return—

but not before we have paved it all over.

‘Neither,

because I want growth.’

And the earth waits,

as it always has,

watches the rising towers

and falling wings,

feels the weight

of our forgetting.

Still, it murmurs beneath our feet,

a quiet, unbroken plea—

remember,

remember,

before all that remains

is hunger.

- Rev’d Jon Swales, 2025