This video feels like a requiem to me. Driving through this feels like going through a graveyard.
The clearcuts make their patchy way
up- Island.
Half the mountain has been sheared off
at Kennedy Hill
to make the road to Tofino
wider for cars and trucks,
and all the germy tourists
pouring in.
Heading through the provincial "park",
the forest on both sides of the road
are gouged by hungry bulldozers,
to make a $51 million dollar
path for bicycles,
fine in theory, though at terrific cost;
but they are cutting
four times wider than the path will be.
Stumps tip over, huge roots
pointing at the sky -
as if the wisdom teeth of the planet
are being pulled.
Such culture as we have knows
only one way forward: cut everything down,
pave the way for the dominant species
and their cars,
even during a climate crisis,
when we need every tree we've got,
and a pandemic, when we will soon
need every penny.
The Tla-o-qui-aht elders watch,
wrinkled faces impassive, eyes concerned,
their polite voices unheeded
when they speak of Mother Earth's lungs,
the dying salmon, the polluted streams.
Watching their home be laid waste,
the home they have tended for millennia
with such care and grace,
they silently close their communities;
keep the madness and the virus out.
When it all goes to shit, it will be
these same folk who will help us learn
how to survive in the toughest of times,
eat what's local, share what's left.
Protect what survives.
The colonial culture of destruction
has wrought horrors on Mother Earth.
Her hillsides bleed and weep;
my heart bleeds and weeps with her.
I reject the culture of destruction
that is mine; admire the culture
of the people of the earth,
their reverence for life;
I share their aching hearts,
the knowing that we mamalthni*
have gotten it
so wrong.
*mamalthni means white people
for earthweal: culture and the environment
Is this close to where you live? You would never catch me driving there. Yikes!!!
ReplyDeleteYes, this is the road - the only road - in.........has always been narrow and winding and scary, but now a disaster, so many landslides with the blasting. And sometimes washouts when the rain is heavy.
ReplyDeleteSO treacherous! I could really not handle it - either driving or as a passenger.
DeleteThe temporary bridge is where the road completely collapsed under a blasting accident. Road was closed for a couple of days.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you wrote this poem in response to the challenge Sherry. I really wrestled with my response. My first ones were so angry I couldn't find anything poetic about them at all. I gave up and wrote my watered down response about the local nature reserve.
ReplyDeleteThe situation you describe with the constant clearing of prime forest so that tourists can swarm all over the place is exactly what's happening here too. This patriarchal capitalist culture mostly run by hetro white men in suits really has to end or we will go the way of the dinosaurs.
Personally I think the economic fallout from the Covid crisis marks the end of that culture though it will put up a fight and try and wring the last bit of coinage out of nature first. I agree that the indigenous people hold great wisdom and that we will need to learn from them. Suzanne 0f Mapping Uncertainity
I feel the same about the tourists coming into Norfolk, Sherry, and I’m not even from here originally. After 28 years, I’ve come to love the natural landscape and wildlife here. Although our new dual carriageway means quicker journeys to and from London, I worry about any further additions to the road system here. I feel for the trees that are cutting down and my heart skipped a beat when I read the lines:
ReplyDelete‘Stumps tip over, huge roots
pointing at the sky -
as if the wisdom teeth of the planet
are being pulled.’
So sad - so much destruction with so little understanding of the consequences Thank you for being witness.
ReplyDeleteOnce even Republicans were conservationists. Our children no longer know the land, and see it only as an impediment to their comfort and to progress (whatever that is...what is it exactly?)
ReplyDelete"Stumps tip over, huge roots
ReplyDeletepointing at the sky -
as if the wisdom teeth of the planet
are being pulled."
I feel your heartbreak, the indigenous pain, and also your defiance. Reject the culture that rapes nature. Sing of it, make people see it. What we cannot see, we cannot change.
I love your wise words of grief here. We keep doing what may eventually kill us all, but money remains the major concern of those who worship "progress".
ReplyDelete