creative writing on environmental justice
There are no creepy crawlies hiding in my garden. I know, because I’ve checked.
The compost, under-turned and full of fresh scraps, should have attracted all manner of bugs and buzzers. The tree hanging overhead should be bowing down with orb weavers, feasting on the to-and-fro flitting parade. The bushes should be moving, rustling, going bump in the night . . .
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 . . .
Winter comes (in Provence, it looks much the same as summer from a distance, only crisp and windier), and with it the end of a long, harrowing year. A year of sorrow, for the families of a million and a half. A year of change, some say, though change may be less eagerly anticipated than a return to normal. An opportunity to take a break, for a lucky few, to think, to watch, . . .
The call for submissions for Reckoning 5’s poetry started as a scribbled note in a water-damaged notebook I lost years ago. It was Toronto labour rights activist and scholar Dr. Winnie Ng’s answer to a 2013 panel question on what she’d tell young organizers: that we can organize from rage, but where it was possible, you could go the long haul if you organized from . . .