BLOCKADE

LYNN THOMPSON PHOTOGRAPHY

Union Bay, BC

August 1993 - Clayoquot Sound 

Grandmother,

I can feel you near me

as I dance and sing

with this group of women

on the road.

We mourn man's treatment 

of the earth

as, at the same time, 

we celebrate

our power.

We have a voice

and we will use it.

Our drumbeat is 

the heartbeat

of the Earth Mother.

After all the untold years

of pain and tears

that held me down,

I have risen

as an eagle 

seeks higher ground,

no more earth-bound.

I have found my voice

and I will sing with it,

laugh into tomorrow,

feel my strength, 

my peacefulness

and my joy,

along with love and pain

for Mother Earth.

Grandmother,

now that I am 

a grandmother, too,

I can hear you.

The summer of '93 saw the biggest incidence of civil disobedience in British Columbia, when thousands came from all over to protest the clearcutting of the old growth in Clayoquot Sound. Hundreds were willingly arrested, standing guard for the trees. My hours on the blockade those early mornings were among the most passionate of my life. We had a Peace Camp nearby all summer, in one of the clearcuts left behind by the logging company, and the night we closed the Peace Camp down lives forever in my memory: hippies dancing in a clearcut under a big, round Grandmother Moon. Oh, such times, kids, such times!

In the photo above, I was on Meares Island, walking the Tall Tree Trail, gigantic trees unlike anything you have ever known a tree to be. They are still there, thankfully, protected by the Nuu chah nulth people, who stopped the loggers from clearcutting Meares Island. But twenty years later, there is still clearcutting going on, most of Vancouver Island has now been logged. Corporate business as usual. 

posting for the Poetry Pantry at Poets United