EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of the Abyss
I am pleased to be taking part in EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, a global project of the arts to transform public awareness and shift from exploitive to respectful compassionate ways of living.
See the EXTRACTION website for details and participants list.
My first work for the Extraction project is the publication of my manuscript of poems for the crisis of a warming world. The manuscript includes my two long poems,"Report," previously published as a chapbook by dPress, and "Last Report," both of which document by date, the tides, wind, temperature (and implicit weather events) against a backdrop of celestial cycles and fragments of daily news. Other poems in the book include "Cell Songs," "In the Cities of Sleep," "Safe Harbor" and the following:
WINTER PILGRIMS
The form of a pilgrimage is makeshift.
Ronald Grimes
First were the boats –
rafts, dories, even an inner-tube,
in the Mediterranean. A boy
washed up face-down in Greece.
Innumerable rescues and many
too late, bodies floating
like fallen feathers.
I wanted to write about them -- the diaspora
of the 21st Century.
They come in waves over land and water
from Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Nigeria –
I wanted to write about them
the refugees, though no one wants to call them that.
Refugees have rights. Migrants
are flightless birds, spoiled fruit, parts
of broken promises -- pressed between countries,
between civil collapse and the loss
of arable land – I saw them
on the television in the Nissan Sales and Service lobby
with the sound off
thousands
gathered in the winter woods
with their meager consolation of thin jackets
and small fires and thin blue tents,
the same blue tents we see along our freeways
where P2P-meth users huddle against the sear
of uselessness, discarded lives in blue tents
everywhere
here
and there
in the winter woods
without food, with snow the only water –
I saw them
on the TV
with the sound off.
Tired of waiting
my car still not ready
I walked through November's dusk
to the closest coffee shop – a Starbucks –
as the tipped cup of the moon came up
above the neon strip of auto row,
There she is, I thought, the silver lady
pouring her light
on the busy street
on the blue tents by the overpass
and on him -- the boy with the animal-ears cap
I'd seen on TV in his father's arms
facing a wall of razor wire.
I wanted to write about them to report
from one human to another
about those people in the forest.
An infant who died of exposure is buried there
and a Syrian man who drowned in the border river.
There were others too.
The silver lady spilled her cup
on their graves. Days later her light
floods the woods, floods over the snow
stained by their pilgrimage
and over the abandoned debris, the residue
of their defeat, evidence of their presence
and their departure. Could you say
in a manner of speaking
from the heart
that now those woods are a makeshift sacred ground?
I wanted to write about them
our brothers and sisters seeking milk and honey
or just a job
and a plate of crappy food
and a safe place to sleep. Or just
to get out of the killing cold.
I wanted to write about the blue tents –
to say those people matter.
I wanted to mark the time and place --
mine walking to Starbucks
and theirs
on the border of Poland and Belarus
and in the no-man's-land beside the freeway --
all of us
under the same silver lady.
I wanted to say these people are strangers
only because we have yet
to recognize ourselves.