Saving the World, Photon by Photon

(This poem began life in free verse with the title "Capturing the Sun", but I thought it might be an interesting exercise to rewrite it in a different format, namely a variant of blank verse. This was the format used by Shakespeare to write most of his plays and by Milton for "Paradise Lost". My blank verse falls far short of theirs! Proper blank verse comprises unrhymed iambic pentameters - my poem meets the requirements of lack of rhyme and 10 syllables to every line, but I cannot claim to have written in perfect iambs throughout!)

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The panels are on the roof, giving us

Power as they turn sunlight into watts,

Cutting our bills while saving the planet.

But since the guys who put them there went home

(In brilliant sunshine I might well add)

The clouds have come and gathered ever since -

Not so much as a peep, peek, squint or shard

Of the big, hot yellow ball in the sky.

But all is not lost hook, line and sinker,

For these panel things work – as the man said –

Just from exposure to normal daylight.

After Day One, the sunshine meter says

That we have now saved dear old Planet Earth

Ten kilos worth of carbon dioxide.

Wow! That is twenty-two pounds in English!

The weight of ten bags of granulated!

Or of three decent-sized new-born babies!

A CO2 counterbalance (maybe)

To a ranch cow having a burp or two?

A plane flying half a millimetre?

A rainforest sapling being chopped down?

Some fat arse trumping on a golf-course green?

(Surely that last is more than ten kilos?)

But, when the sun does eventually

Deign to appear, what planet-saving then?

Could there be half an hour of beefy burps?

Maybe a whole metre of jet-plane flight?

Save a tree and the ape that lives in it?

(Don’t know about the fat-arsed golfer, though).

But it’s not just us who are doing this -

If a million roofs bask in the sun

And together make billions of watts,

Surely that will do dear old Planet Earth

A solar-panelled, mighty power of good?