creative writing on environmental justice
She is green in the sunlight
standing at the brink of her little home
little because she is little.
We are an odd direction life took
because life takes all odd directions
the little ground-dwelling bees,
they carried pollen when plum trees and apples
bloomed early,
a direction odd to honeybees and bumblebees.
I have a chickadee in my plum tree;
plums by the grace . . .
These found poems are drawn from interviews with elderly citizens of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation recorded in 1937-38 as part of the Indian-Pioneer History Project sponsored by the federal Works Progress Administration and archived at the Oklahoma Historical Society and the University of Oklahoma.
Older and Very Sour
1
the creek indians had . . .
Rivers lament over why they were born, they
Question their existence, ask their maker if any
The rivers weep copious tears no one can see
For the loss irreparable. Clinically dead, they
Seem to wait for a time when news echoes in
The air: the wasteland returns. Cuckoos will
No more sing to declare the advent of spring
Deadly and ear-piercing cries of humans and
Animals . . .
Like coronary occlusion, it began small, spiral shell and Sierpinski gasket, a vibration amongst the strings rippling outward into rising sea levels, Pacific hurricane, the exhalation of universes, sublime and terrifying– and then we were gone. Love and strings; they go together.
I poured into him my rivers with their poisons, my plains and valleys . . .