SORACHA O'ROURKEof Presentation College Currylea, Tuam, Co Galway, has imagined a chilling letter to Barack Obama from his greatest enemy, global warming
DEAR PRESIDENT Obama, It has been a year of dreams for you so far. Everyone knows your name, but I will always be more powerful, more imposing and better known than you. I have touched more people’s lives and shaken hands with every member of the globe.
The corners of my thin black lips curl into a smile each morning at rush hour. My eyelids close in ecstasy as I inhale my favourite perfumes of nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxide, not to mention the carbon: a bouquet of my favourite scents.
I am the black dancing vapour that pirouettes around the long factory chutes, hovers over bonfires, twirls around chimneys. Coal is my mother; turf is my father, peat and oil my sisters. They fill me with the fuel that I need. I am eternally grateful to my family – without them I am nothing. I am the one who now sprinkles soot, my own little garnish, over the delicate trees. However, will their stomata work when they’re clogged? Oh, it’s such a pity. I am the rugged winds that carry the dirt particles – my precious diamonds, the assortment of whirling, hazy gases, the boas of smoke from their commercialised points of origins – across vast oceans.
I AM A baker mixing my ingredients with some water and kneading a soft fluffy cloud of acid ready to fall as precipitation. I smirk at the dirty children in torn rags that drink the water I have infected, the twist of their features at its foul-tasting flavour. My homemade liquor has transformed lakes where fish used to frolic into green, murky pools with a cellophane covering of algae.
I am in charge of the Earth’s central heating; it is I who turns up the dial. Oops, I must have forgotten to rewire the sprinkler system. Many can’t last more than a few days in my dehydrated sauna.
I can paint the skies a thunderous and foreboding shade of ebony, illuminated by electric jolts of yellow neon flashes and paired with a symphony of rumbles. I call together the shoals of overcast and grant the prayers of the people. I spit heavily at them – sensations like bullets against skin, indenting the barren earth, stripping apart whatever sparse vegetation remains.
I feel pleasure when families go to bed hungry with their stomachs in knots. The screams of the orchestra of babies are my compilation of Mozart’s most fabulous creations. Toddlers’ matchstick joints buckle with rickets. I run my hands along their chests, counting their visible ribs with my fingertips. Their jagged, sharp shoulders protrude against their tanned, mud-caked skin, creating open wounds encrusted with pus. I stand back and examine my beautiful scene. It is all mine. I am accountable.
Scientists have labelled me with names like global warming. Students write essays on me entitled climate change. But to those that witness my wrath first-hand, absorb the shockwaves of my fury, and drink the tears of my frustration, I am called the Grim Reaper. There is no escape, I will collect them all. Care to challenge me Mr President?
