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.

Sufi Dancing in My Head

[This NASA photo of the so-named Eye of God,
is of the Helix Nebula, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope]

Big old orb up there,

filled with a zillion stars

and shiny with stardust,

keep a benign eye

on us down here.

Beam that benevolent

celestial eye

all across this planet.

Sprinkle kindness

and stardust

everywhere you look.

When we gaze up at you,

may we each

become a Rumi,

filled with ecstasy and wonder,

so when you next look down

you'll see us all

grinning

like mad fools,

and wildly dancing.

for Sumana's open link at What's Going On.

This poem was written in happier times. Right now wildfires are burning all over BC and whole towns are being evacuated. Skies are apocalyptic, and terrified wild and domestic animals can be seen running through corridors of flame. Many wild ones will die. It is hard to  write anything positive as it feels like denial. So I pulled up this old one, from a time when dancing on the earth was more appropriate.

His Eyes

 

His eyes

looking up at me, age four,

huge, round, dark blue,

innocent. When I told him

he would have a baby sister

and we would teach her

how to walk and talk,

"and how to be happy" he said,

his kindness making me

catch my breath in awe

at the largeness

of his soul.

His eyes, always laughing,

as a child, so joyous,

dancing with his baby sister,

hugging her close; later,

as a teen, so protective,

holding her hand on the street

as bullies taunted him.

"Dont worry. Just keep walking,"

he said. Keeping her safe.

His eyes, at seventeen,

in the psych ward

as his world collapsed:

still, the same blue eyes,

still, the same wry smile.

His eyes, through his illness,

haunted, tortured,

as his dreams all dimmed,

his life growing lonely

as the walls closed in.

His eyes, that Monday morning,

through the tablet screen:

trapped and helpless

on his hospital bed

as life throws another hurdle

in his path, that has already

been so hard.

If I could switch places

with him, I would,

but I can only look into

those same blue eyes

with all my mother's heart -

those eyes still the colour

of all my morning skies.

In 2021, my son, age 50, whose life was already challenging, suffered a serious stroke, affecting the left side of his body. A musician, he can no longer play guitar, or compose music. He still writes amazing poetry though.

For Mary's prompt at What's Going On - Eyes

WILDFIRES

 

Wild Woman is grappling with
grief, gratitude and bearing witness.
(Gratitude for each ordinary day
of life, because at any moment,
it can change.
Gratitude for the gifts already given,
when the world was still
somewhat sane.)

The climate crisis has been known for 40 years -

by the oil companies too,
but money has always mattered more.

We humans are not the only ones paying.
We have resources, there is help,
we can somehow make our way
through devastation,
even when it repeats and repeats
and governments fail to summon
the courage to act.
We have wheels
to get away to
Somewhere Else.

My heart is with the terrified horses,
running in the hundreds along the highway.
With the bear and deer and wolves, 
babies at their side, born just this spring,
running through the fiery halls of hell -
ourfaultourfaultourfault.

Roads are clogged with cars 
full of humans fleeing,
their trusting loving dogs and cats left behind,
because humans always matter most, it seems,
in this screwed up world,
though the animals are at our mercy (or its lack)
and have no voice, no advocates,
no escape
from the hell we have wrought.

On the news,
they do not share their screams.
But I hear them.

I will forever hear them.

Over 300 wildfires are burning in B.C., and more are burning across Canada, as well as in France, and other countries. Each summer is worse than the last, yet governments prefer to pay to clean up after disasters, after whole villages and towns are displaced, than take a preventative approach ("which costs too much money") though what we're doing now costs much more, and not just in dollar bills.

I write poems about hope. But I am now fatalistic. Extractive capitalism's bill is coming due. And we can't afford to pay it. My heart is with the innocents - the children, the animals, the wild ones, the Indigenous people who have always known how to live with Mother Earth, who only ask for the right to live, who do not deserve to suffer the consequences of what humans (governments) have done.

ALIVE, ON PLANET EARTH

gotofino.com

When the Westerly blows,

and waves crash rapturously

upon the shore,

when treetops poke their spires

up through the fog and mist

along the slopes of Wah'nah'juss,

my heart exults in wonder.

When the eagle's piercing cry

echoes across the harbour,

and the heron picky-toes

along the rocky shore

seeking her breakfast,

when dogs with loopy grins

go lolloping in and out

of the waves at Chestermans,

and surfers stand to ride, and fall,

and rise again,

When the morning sun rises

over Lemmens Inlet,

geese flying above in a wavering V,

as the sandpipers whirl and swoop as one

along the water's edge,

and ravens croak their gobble-cry,

When sunset paints the sky

with colours too fantastic to describe

as the big old fiery orb sinks down

below the horizon at day's end,

When just being alive and breathing

in this forever power-place

seems wealth beyond compare,

and I most richly blessed,

thankfulness expands my heart

to bursting, again and again,

so dearly do I cherish the beauty,

the sheer interconnected wonder

of Clayoquot Sound.

How grateful I am

to have walked this earth walk

along its beloved shores,

the song of the waves

forever advancing and retreating

in my heart;

how dearly I feel the blessing,

rich with all life's worth,

just to have another day,

like this,

alive, on planet earth.

Marnie Recker Photography

WILD WOMAN ON HOPE

 

"Hope is the thing with feathers,*" the poet said,
and, when she sits listening to the sweet,
warbled trills of a song sparrow,
Wild Woman believes.

Hope tiptoes into her heart against all reason:
against the toxic rhetoric on the nightly news,
against the daily horrors across the globe,
against the planet heating up while they build
more pipelines, against all the reasons
that try to squash our expectation
that good will always triumph over evil.

Hope with feathers is very fragile;
it must be tended with care.

Hope is the gentle deer, nibbling seed
at the bird feeder because the grass
has turned brown in the heat.
Hope is the black horse's big,
intelligent eye, her nose whuffing
against Wild Woman's fingers,
as she breathes her in and finds her safe.
Hope is a litter of puppies who,
if fate is kind, will grow up safe
and loved and never suffer.
(May it be so!)
Hope is greenery and flowers,
that pop up even in scorched earth,
after wildfire, after bombs -
Mother Earth messaging us: See?
See how easy it is to simply bloom?

*from "Hope is the Hardest Love We Carry" by Jane Hirshfield

for my prompt at What's Going On - Hope. The prompt is inspired by a line in a poem by Jane Hirshfield - "Hope is the hardest love we carry." It is, for sure. And of course the Dickinson line is well recognized.

Bird Math

"A poem should always have birds in it,"
the poet said. And "A person wants to stand
in a happy place in a poem."

Here is the mathematics of this poem:

1. My poems are often full of birds.
    But they are having a hard time
    out-shouting the black-hearted rhetoric
    spewing from my tv screen, that makes
    my heart sink and forget how to sing.

2. How can we stand in a happy place
    in the poem of our lives while
    stormtroopers are beating
    and firing upon peaceful citizens,
    and veterans and mothers,
    and caging children because
    their skin is brown?
    While people are abusing animals
    and hating each other?
    Where the world is in survival mode
    and has forgotten how to be kind?

3. I can tell you that, down by the shore,
    herons are picky-toe-ing peacefully
    along the mudflats.
    I can point out the eagle, surveying
    his kingdom from the top of a snag.
    I can show you my balcony
    full of chattering jays
    and swift little hummers,
    all living in blessed ignorance
    of the weight we humans
    are carrying.

4. Bless them. When we look up
    for a moment to track their
    heart-lifting passage across the sky,
    we remember what it was,
    once, to dream.

Inspired by "Singapore" by Mary Oliver. The italicized lines are hers.

for Susan's prompt at What's Going On: Mathematics