WHEN I COME BACK, I WILL BE GRIEF

 

We start out whole,

losing pieces of ourselves

along the way,

and then reclaiming them.

That is the journey.

I am collecting the last few bits,

before I fly into the light.

I pick them up:

ah, there you are!

and add them to my pack.

When I return,

I will change my shape.

I will be cattails,

standing dry, bent and broken

at the edge of the dried-up pond.

I will be wolf-pup,

peering fearfully from my den,

knowing, to survive,

I must elude

Earth’s biggest enemy:

the predatory Two-Leggeds,

and they are

everywhere.

I fear

I will find a planet burning,

from Big Oil,

humans and animals

on the run.

I will be Tree,

gasping for air,

a sudden irradiation

as the orange tongues

lick greedily at my corpse.

I will be deer,

fleeing the flaming forests.

I will be mother orca, holding

my dead newborn calf

above the water

for seventeen days, grieving,

unable to let her go,

saying to the humans:

See! See what you have done!

I will be grief itself,

watching the world I love

burning itself up.

As I am now.

As I am now.

I wrote this several years ago, when a wildfire was burning near where I lived. Each year, more wildfires - more forests - more small towns - more First Nations reserves - burn. This year, across Canada, the scenes are apocalyptic: orange skies, animals and humans running between sheets of flames. Animals losing their lives, humans losing their houses in numbers higher than we have ever seen.

The temperatures climb, the earth and forests dry out - all it takes is a lightning strike to start a blaze. And would you believe governments are STILL approving the building of more pipelines? Corporate oil is making a killing - which is literally killing us.

The human pain is devastating. But my heart is with the animals, both domestic and wild, living and dying in terror because of the world we have so badly misused. I hear their screams in my dreams.