06 November 2024

 Let's face it.

This nation was not built on love and hope and equality, it was forged from blood, oil, extraction, genocide, slavery, money, patriarchy, and species decimation.
We need a different system of governance. Perhaps the entire world needs it, because this is true most everywhere with the possible exception of Bhutan.




1 comment:

lostinthewoods said...

As I catch flashes of the rocket launch
feat of technology, testimony to money and power poured into the endeavor,
As the base comes back to rest within the steel arms embrace
I think of time spent once in another life story in far Northwestern Australia
Inhospitable red baked dirt bristling with air conditioning units and mining equipment that dwarfs the mind
Sea so salty one couldn’t swim
But there we are nonetheless, mall and grocery and pie shops and backyard pools transported endless miles

I wonder if we succeed in the Noah’s Ark race off this planet
Bound for some corner of space
Will we tell stories passed through generations of the Earth we doomed
Deemed useless

Of October leaves in unimaginable shades, blowing toward a fresh water lake the size of an inland ocean, that massive, surging blue space once covering the globe

Of monarch migrations, wings shimmering and shattering the illusion of stillness, crossing vast distances with no more weight than a whisper

How to translate the taste of sun kissed summer juicy tomatoes that burst and drip down your chin
Or the startling call of a loon
The scent of lilacs in June thick air, or warmed pine needles, or of thunderstorms and ozone

How there were a million shades of green moss in textures unknown to those future little fingers

And what it felt like to lay naked before a roaring fire after a day spent in fresh snow

What feeling the first shoots of spring green evoked, after long, barren, dark winters

Who will relate that there were a thousand kinds of rain,
from plopping fat drops that disturbed hot dirt,
to the finest mist, seemingly paused on its journey, obscuring the sharp lines of distance,
to torrential rivers of weighted water bearing down

Of creatures only imaginable in dreams and children’s stories, spotted leopard frog and soaring eagle and shaggy bison

Do you think they’ll know of our mountains and deserts and first kisses and babies cries and lovers secrets and smile lines and our last rights and our bones turned to dust and stars

Will the collective deep nostalgia of DNA still cause hearts to yearn
For a whole way of life
Left behind
?

  Let's face it. This nation was not built on love and hope and equality, it was forged from blood, oil, extraction, genocide, slavery,...