Disaster, in Mary F. C. Pratt's poem, is something you can cook. The first of its two sections accuses an unnamed "they" of stirring up a recipe "for ever so long": glossy images and false promises that persuade us "rich means good" while birds, forests, air and water pay the bill. The second section drops the kitchen talk and turns to a plague of caterpillars that strips oak trees bare, then to the trees' answer. Together the halves ask what a disaster really is, and what separates one that only destroys from one that can be survived.
The opening is deliberately chatty and a little sneering. "Tell me I'm wrong" is the voice of someone leaning across a table, and her evidence is everyday: a "shiny magazine," "today's headlines." The pun in "leaf through" is easy to miss, but it plants the natural world inside the very pages that ignore it. The central metaphor is food at its least appetising. The illusion of wealth is "whipped up / like a glop of imitation cream." "Glop" is ugly in the mouth, and "imitation" tells us the sweetness is fake. The dream that anyone can "have it all" is "spoonfeed[ed]," which turns consumers into babies who swallow whatever arrives. Sound does the rest. The early lines only half-rhyme ("long" and "wrong," "cream" and "dream"), but the last four lock into couplets, "matter / water" and "faster / disaster." The beat is a drumming chant that quickens as "they keep stirring fast and faster," so the rhyme itself feels like the runaway process it describes. Even "Lesser creatures never matter" is bitterly ironic, since it is the recipe-makers' view and the second half will make a fool of it.
Part 2 changes gears. The rhyme disappears, the sentences lengthen, and the tone becomes a naturalist's. The caterpillars are not softened, though. They eat "every leaf / on every oak" and move on, "creatures of bristle and hunger," a phrase that packs a whole animal into two nouns. "Poured over one another" makes the swarm flow like liquid. The vocabulary turns scientific and faintly gross ("frass," "iffy goo") as the poem follows leaves through a digestive cycle into droppings, shed skins, cocoons, moths and "more caterpillars." Then "Today" sits alone in an indented gap of white space, the way a season turns. What follows is plain: the oaks are "showing / what can be done," every twig carrying "a tiny leaf or bud." The poem hammers the point home with "Every twig. Every single one," short sentences that sound almost out of breath with relief.
Repeated words stitch the halves together. "Recipe" returns, but now it is "inner," an instinct rather than a plan. "Iffy" moves from the human dream to the caterpillars' goo, and "pore over" headlines echoes the caterpillars that "poured over" each other. These echoes invite a comparison the poem never states outright. The caterpillars are as greedy as anyone, yet their appetite sits inside a loop where waste becomes growth and the trees recover. The human recipe has no loop. It ends in "yet more disaster." The poem implies that a natural catastrophe belongs to a cycle, while the manufactured one just keeps being stirred.
The poem is worth reading because it refuses to stop at complaint. Much writing about environmental damage settles for gloom, but here the hope comes from a stubborn small detail, a bud on a twig, rather than from argument. It is careful hope, too. "What can be done" leaves open who is meant to learn from the oaks, and nothing promises that the "they" of part one will. The reader is left with a challenge in the shape of a tree: look closely at something that has been stripped bare, and notice how much of it is still ready to grow.