Lough

Alan Kennedy-Asser

Just as with the slow decline of aging,
we gather at the bedside of the lough,
hoping our company will be enough.
Its brightness flickers and fades,
going blue-green as a bruise, 
lingering on thinning skin 
after the search for blood.
Chemicals flowing in and out,
pipes and river veins,
machines monitoring, marking time.

An end we knew would come,
a sense of inevitability.
Yet now that it is here,
we are somehow still  
without words, without plans,
hoping and waiting for quick relief,
the kind that comes with human grief 
at a final breath, gone.
But alas, for the lough,
The suffering goes ever on.

The Science

Since 2023, Lough Neagh, the largest lake by area in the British Isles and that supplies 40% of Northern Ireland’s drinking water, has been blighted by blue-green algal blooms, affecting local fisheries, wildlife and recreation users on the lough itself and along the River Bann that flows from it to the north coast of Northern Ireland. This has been a slow building crisis, decades in the making, with multiple contributing factors, including pollution from wastewater and agricultural runoff increasing phosphorous levels, climate change warming the water, and invasive zebra mussels reducing natural competition for the blue-green algae. In 2025, local fishermen declared the lough ‘already dead’. Over three years, what began as a shared sadness and concern for a public resource has quickly turned to a blame game of who is the biggest polluter and the most responsible – like stages of grief in environmental mourning. 

The Poet

Dr. Alan Kennedy-Asser is an interdisciplinary environmental researcher and amateur poet, who works remotely for the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol and lives in Northern Ireland. In 2021-2022, he was an embedded researcher with Climate Northern Ireland, exploring how the use of storytelling can be used in the understanding and communication of climate change risk in rural Northern Ireland.

Next poem: Lungs Grey with Smoke by Alex De Koning