In my defence I did not know that my chosen title was a Bowie song before I used it!  I thought that it had a sort of old-fashioned charm of many of the privately printed pamphlets of the early years of the twentieth century where questions were being asked about the direction that so-called civilisation was taking.
     This title is the result of a meditation on the word 'Animals' and the relationship of that word with what we regard as human.  My initial ideas were, to put it mildly, cynical, and I was thinking about what should have blighted the years of my early teens and cast a shadow over the rest of my life: the ticking down to midnight of the atomic clock of destruction.
     I have always thought it is difficult to hate a species that, after having developed a weapon of mass destruction, could then deploy this weapon in a strategy called MAD - Mutually Assured Destruction!  The 'red in tooth and claw' savagery of Nature has never, until our own time, seen one species have the unique capability of wiping out all life on the planet.  And we are the civilised ones!  As opposed say, to a slug - which, as far as I am aware, has no plans for world domination and is not much preoccupied about those who have!
     I was also thinking about the sorts of questions that we ask ourselves (and our parents) and how we deal with the answers (or the lack of them) in our everyday lives.
     I started my notes thinking about memory and using the cliche of a bridge in time.  I hoped to breathe some life into the cliche by thinking about the quality of remembering comparing the more immediate memory of childhood with the more measure and self-deluding memory of age and contrasting a simple plank bridging a brook with a more 'engineered' bridge in age.
     All of the thoughts above went through a number of drafts and note making.  Another major component in this poem was sheer frustration, as things did not work out as I expected them to.  After a dozen drafts I am at least partially satisfied with the present poem.
     I like the opening two lines and I think that the idea that we sometimes spend more time on the shaping of the way of getting back to what happened rather than the reality of the events that we are trying to remember, is something which I am conscious of when I think of even the simplest of events in my childhood.
     I suppose the ending of the poem retains some of the cynicism which was a bitter starting point for my first thoughts, though I also think that there is a 'saving' ambiguity in the last section which gives pause for thought.

Where are we now?

I.

Bridges built to yesterdays

grow more ornate with age.

The simple, slanted, childhood plank,

rough, solid wood, across a brook,

to link the then with now.

(Harsh grass with broken reeds

and sickly-sweet wild garlic crushed

beneath footfalls of day-before.)

II.

Hour-gone experiences

glitter-flit like dragon flies

catching recall’s gleam and

coruscating ripples

smoothing over stones.

The childhood “Game of ‘Whys?’”

that force the questions

parents find so hard to play:

why is the sea so blue,

when drinking water in my glass

is colourless?

with quick responses like:

I’ll tell you later;

God just made it so;

it’s Science you may come to understand –

at length; and anyway the colour’s nice.

The comfortable words that we are told

that hide the ignorance

sustaining lies that

every answer is out there:

in institutions we don’t know;

in libraries of tight, shut doors.

III.

With time the streams push rivers

through the lakes where blurred

shapes move and twist;

a moment’s light of underbelly

flashing white among dark narratives

is glimpsed, but hardly recognised

from spans, suspended, engineered,

to keep a distance soundly safe.

IV.

There is no special sanctity

from Ur to Angeles

can stop the double helix

twisting human eyes to mirror-gaze

the regimented worlds of ants,

communities of bees –

and realise our place.

This is slightly longer than the usual length of my poems, but I felt that the complexity of the subject matter asked for a more considered response than a short lyric.