CLAYOQUOT SUMMER 1993

                                  

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.

I wrote this poem at work in Tofino in the summer of '93. Early that morning, I was on the road at the blockades at the women's gathering to stop the logging of Clayoquot Sound. We did a spiral dance on the road. We were joyous,  dancing for the trees, and for life, and a future for all beings. My heart burst with passion as, one by one, people were arrested for standing on the road for the trees. I could not risk arrest as I had kids to raise and I had to keep my jobs (three or four at a time, at those days of struggle.) I reluctantly went from the road to work that day, and the poem came to me as I fulfilled my tasks.

Sally Sunshine

How I longed to be at the Peace Camp that summer, on the road every morning. But I was there on the mornings I could be there, and the women's blockade was the most passionate morning of my life. Nothing filled my heart like standing on the road to protect the trees.

Tonight I am watching Fury For the Sound,  a film about the women of Clayoquot in the summer of '93. 856 people were charged that summer,  and many were jailed for their participation that summer. Some grandmothers spent months in jail for standing on the road to protest the clearcutting of the ancient forests.  Children and the elderly took pride in making that stand, fighting for a future for the beings of the earth, who need trees to live and breathe and stay shaded from the sun.

Here we are, so many years later. Clearcutting continues. Wildfires occur now every spring, summer and fall, Tofino's rainforest is no longer a rainforest, as we have drought much of the year. Hardly any intact old growth forests are left on Vancouver Island. Talk and log continues because Money Rules. And politicians want to keep their jobs, so no hard decisions are made. I weep as I watch the film of our passion in 1993. Those brave people stopped the clearcutting of Clayoquot Sound for a time,  but we have watched, these past years, more and more trees fall - to housing, to development, to what they call "Progress". As the planet heats up.