creative writing on environmental justice
When I was younger,
say twelve or thirteen.
I asked my preacher Dad
“How does God sound when he speaks to a mortal man like you?”
He said “Try to talk with water in your mouth,
multiply the rumble you make by infinity.
Try to read a message of inverted alphabets
arranged backwards and italized like birds standing on a rope.
Imagine the mighty . . .
Already, the sunlight is shrinking like an old shirt
that barely covers the belly, even while it glows
gilding the dried up cattails, the snapped branches
that pierce the cloudless sky like a severed bone.
Only smudges of light left on the slick leaves
languishing in icy mud, and on the rushing squirrels,
newly fattened for their long, incredible fast. . . .
come, sit on the mountain, and
watch us speak to the stars.
their language is
morse code and phasic shifts;
we paint in roads and villages
and the hum of high-voltage
transformers, we murmur
in street lamps and stadiums
and the ill-mannered leak
of a window.
like shouting through high wind,
we are veiled
by clouds and magnetic storms and
the jealous . . .
bleach blonde was the look of the summer:
colorless skeleton of polyps and aging fish spines.
rocks smoothly slate gray as salt water
grinds it down; it had no algal coat to protect and
nourish, no obsidian shelled mussels hanging off
the edges, beating themselves to the rhythm of the tide.
the moon rises and so the tide flows, warming waves
crashed, . . .
We are sorry for the way this will arrive,
damp and damagesome. No doubt
the peculiar constitutions of our nations,
catastrophically susceptible to each other,
account for the long gap in correspondence
though here we find no record of any sort
to suggest a former, well-established channel.
That is, however, the way of our state;
we operate, as you can see, impromptu, . . .
My fiancée’s aunt takes us to look for owls.
We wear ice cleats. New family, new ways,
but I’m an indoor cat (cats are another thing
I’ve had to learn). I am new at this, new
as the ring on my finger, but my love
puts on earmuffs and glows in the full moon.
I pull up my hood. We stand in a circle
and strain for owl calls. Who-cooks-for-you?
Who-cooks-for-you? my new aunt . . .
maybe ground is meant to ripple
and sag like skin showing
her age. the wisdom
of roots aching to surface
maybe we’re meant to stumble
and break blades made for vain
manicuring to steep amazement
in unpredictable growth
you downed nana cottonwood onto
teenaged limbs, too young
to hold weighted life, a shock
of white, stripped . . .
Bukod sa tubig, bukod sa paglalayag, mga pagpatay
at mga resulta ng pagbibilang ng hakbang,
pagsunod sa kapahamakan gayundin ang pagkilala
sa mga galaw na itinatago ng mga dayandang.
Malamig ang panahon para sa paglukso
sa mga konklusyon kung dumidistansiya
ba ang mga konstelasyon. Parang nauuso
na naman ang pagmimiron sa mga signos
ng pagbabalik ng Panginoon. . . .
Aside from water, aside from sailing, killings
and results of counting steps,
in pursuit of danger as well as familiarity
of gestures shielded from view by dayandang trees.
The season’s too cold for leaping
to conclusions on whether constellations are drifting farther
away from us. Doomsday cultists are coming out of the woodwork
these days, crowing about . . .
So, here we are
at the end.
We have pulled down the sails to make patches for the ocean, come
we will patch those patches with paisley scraps,
with blue and white checks like
Dorothy’s dress, we will save scraps of paper
to cover half-written books; come we will grab
one last plank from the ship to patch
somewhere out past the epilogue. Come,
there is so much farther . . .