A lullaby sung over a rubbish heap: that is the odd music of this untitled poem by Tristan H. Globes. It sends two children into "The Valley of Decay", a landscape of landfill, dead grass and dead animals. At first the valley looks like a place where everything ends, even clouds. By the last lines, the children's small acts of defiance have started to change what the place is.
The most noticeable feature is the refrain. "Little Boy, Little Boy" and "Little Girl, Little Girl" open nearly every stanza, and the doubled names sound like a nursery rhyme or a story told at bedtime. Each address is followed by a command: "Walk," "look up," "pull out," "pluck it out," "climb." The speaker is part guide, part storyteller, and part drill sergeant. The poem has no regular rhyme or meter, so the chant-like repetition does the work of holding it together. The soothing sound is deliberately at odds with the content, and that gap makes the poem unsettling.
The imagery is repellent but also darkly funny. Raccoons "glutton without haste", which turns a noun into a verb and makes the animals lazy and bloated. The dead squirrels are "casualties of great squirrel wars", a mock-heroic phrase that treats rodent corpses like fallen soldiers. Even the word "sanguine" carries a double meaning. It can mean blood-red, but it also means cheerfully hopeful, which sits strangely beside "cadavers". The poem does the same with "gay cloud-satiated flies." The flies are cheerful because they are feeding, and the "buzzing rainfall" suggests the rain is partly made of them. Cheerfulness and rot sit side by side throughout.
The cloud is the poem's strangest figure. The girl looks up at a sky with "not a cloud in sight", and then "a lone cloud has come to join us / at the place where clouds come to die". The valley sounds like an elephants' graveyard for weather. Its hospitality is sinister: "we are generous hosts," the speaker tells the cloud, and invites it to "unload your burdens and relax." The black umbrella reads as a funeral accessory, so the children seem to be attending the cloud's death. The poem's last line then changes one word. The valley becomes "the place where clouds come to defy." Death turns into resistance, and the change is only a matter of sound and spelling, which suggests how thin the line between giving up and fighting on may be.
Hope appears in two forms, and the poem is careful with both. The first is the phrase "not all hope is gone," used twice, once to the girl and once to the boy. It is a double negative, and it promises very little. Nobody says hope is plentiful, only that some remains. The second is the "bright shade of valentine pink" that the boy notices growing from the earth, which is a flash of colour in a gray and brown landscape. The "valentine" detail hints at love, and in fact the climax is a meeting. The girl is "the other half you have been seeking." The boy brings her an oleander, and the poem does not say whether that is a gift or a risk. Oleander is a beautiful but poisonous plant, and the poem never mentions this. The gift is meant to "breath hope and life back" into the valley, but a reader who knows the plant may feel the hope is not entirely safe. The closing "For now" supports that reading. It is a hedge that keeps the ending provisional and stops it from becoming a neat happy one.
The structure also moves upward. The poem begins with the boy treading "heavily" on the ground and ends with him climbing the mountain of tire rubber "until you feel like you're going to die." The effort of climbing becomes the way the characters get through. The girl's instruction to "scream your lungs out and cry" is a similar release, and it is surprising to find an outburst of grief offered as a path toward hope.
The poem is worth reading because it avoids two easy options. It does not simply mourn a ruined world, and it does not pretend the world can be fixed with a single flower. It reads as an ecological fable, though it never says so. It lets children's language and ugly images pull against each other until a small, uncertain hope comes out of the mix.