In 2005, I drove great grandmother Home from church Back to our family farm And we talked about rain The plants sure needed it But poor New Orleans The black sky, the dancing trees My grandmother, Told me of her childhood Of woods that children watched But did not enter Of wolves who watched them back My grandmother told me she watched those trees fall Traded for Black Angus Until the family farm Could not keep up with Commercial antibiotics Today trees fall there again For a four car garage And the great American dream Stands on a great oak grave Tonight I watch the news Cry foul that brown skinned farmers in the amazon Do what white men did here just generations ago Do what white men forced black skinned farmers to do Here Just generations ago Just a generation ago There were yellow bees On the farm with the red dirt tracks Once I ran past their buzzing hive Quick and afraid Now I fear because I cannot hear them The Glyphosate induced patterns they draw Erratic like a failing heart A generation ago The monarch danced here In a field sheltered by tall pines But come fall she was mowed down with the hay Listen. The fluttering sound of soft wings. Beating at the border Come. Build a milkweed bridge between us. Come. Love your neighbor. Come. Proclaim peace. Peace between us Must be offered by human hands The gods will not lift a finger To save the cities built On destroyed forest temples The temple is burning I see the faces of thousands in the fire Can you see their humanity? Who is my enemy? There is no enemy here. I see myself I see myself In the rear view mirror the day that I drove great grandmother home from church The sky was turning black, the trees danced And she said she remembered Hurricane Hazel in 1950 And how just 5 years before she'd heard the bells ringing and ringing Ringing for V day The bells are ringing Fire! Fire! We huddle in the basement With a sky dissolved by chlorofluorocarbons Our house full of smog and poison We cannot breath The bells are ringing So mournfully For chestnut trees and kuckoo birds But we cannot go underground Like our dead We cannot ride out the storm Beneath the earth Instead rise Rise like saplings Rise bursting from the ground Roar with the wind For the bees and monarchs For rights of descendants* For wealth for children For peace to the heavens Peace to the heavens* Heaven to the earth Earth under heaven Strength in each A cup overfull With the fullness of honey
(*Credit for parts of these stanzas go to an ancient Irish peace prophecy in the Cath Maige Tuired, credit for the translation: Ravenna, M. The Book of the Great Queen. Concrescent Press, 2015.)
