If we could lift understanding
to indigenous teachings
expand our love
to earth, sky, and sea
Make personal gain taboo
and Ancients a weigh point
If we could witness the mountains
slow floating across the sky
and touch the dolphin’s soul
anxiously swimming
where tuna are netted
Would we cower at our insignificance
or move forward, learning to accept
that all of life is deeply woven
into the fabric of our collective hopes.
(Image my own)
(Image my own)
How did undocumented –
a civil infraction –
reduce people to ‘bodies’?
And how did empathy –
observation and support –
merit death by gunshot?
When we stretch for explanations –
to fit the violent rhetoric –
are we too not complicit in crime?
Red, blue, it’s all intolerable –
the global stage is watching –
a nation in rapid decline.
“He’ll burn it all down,”
we’d been warned –
prophetic at that.
The terror escalates,
the system no longer works,
people are uprising to stunned silence
Where is the hand of justice,
governance for and of the people,
a nation for all….gone?
Greed drives this destructive machine.
Cut off the source of fuel, methinks –
if power is to act out empathy.
Planted seeds for prosperity –
images of children frolicking
the delight of yellow horizons
tradition setting our fields ablaze
Till greed came knocking –
brother turning on brother
Rhetoric and lies shrapnel
shattering our dreams
Only the deer frolic now
unwitting participants in
this unprovoked slaughter
land mines defiling landscapes
But seeds are not lost,
nor are the legacy of generations
whose soil has known the red of blood
spirits who cannot be deterred
Independence will remain ours
the land a testimony to our toil
fortitude born of oppression
Ukraine stands proud.
(Image my own. Currently, in Ukraine, most areas have electricity outages, leaving inhabitants with hours of no light or heat in this cold. Any talk of peace is propaganda. The bombing has escalated.)
Dove’s mournful cry
spotlights Nature’s calling –
Let us find a harmonic note
sing along for conservation,
for preservation, for a strong
tomorrow – find our voices
and join the chorus.
(Image my own)
I hear my mother’s voice
questioning my intentions
certain I’m not doing it right
this wifely thing
I’ll be abandoned, surely –
it all rests on a string for her –
if dinner isn’t on the table at 4:38
or the beds are not made right away
or the laundry basket, unfolded,
remains in sight –
then who blames the man
for leaving.
Six generations now
I’ve witnessed women fighting
for equality, for recognition
and still the old guard holds on
And now politicians –
men with loose jowled egos
and paunchy stances –
and so-called religious leaders
call for a retraction –
women’s lives at stake
Who will lobby for women’s rights
when the female voice is silenced
needs carefully tucked away
so as not to raise ire in her mate?
(Warning: foul language)
Rallies, hired guards,
warnings of revolution
and God knows what
Ambition is a cruel cage
Freak offs, and hitmen,
made-up masculinity
unintelligible banter
Power wields cold chains
Misogyny is not a win
archaic ideations –
not the mark of divinity-
Free the barbed emotions
of Patriarchal walls
unstable…and now…
exposed
Despair is paralysis
a surrender to the lies
Shooter drills no solution
It’s fear that motivates
and righteousness that binds
and in the white noise
of rising awareness
The perpetrators
calmly walk away
Exit strategy preplanned
While we pray
that karma is a bitch
and limp back
to our wasted lives.
(Art my own)
(Warning: Poem makes reference to child abuse)
She taught me how to stay out of sight
the women who worked the candy counter
Dragged my fourteen-year-legs in beside her
as management brushed past, oblivious
Stick to the aisles and passageways, she said
Make sure you are always busy.
She couldn’t say the words that burned on her tongue:
He’ll follow you into darkened corners of the warehouse
He’ll lock the doors and tell you it’s all your fault
No one talked about what this man did,
five floors beneath the department store opulence
While people shopped, and ate, and bought
The wheels of consumerism, well-oiled
stuffing our consciousness with lies and deceit
the vulnerable confined to shadows and margins
But some of us will never forget
Innocent fragments haunting locked corners
Ensuing rage still railing against the injustice
That puts a pedophile in charge.
(Image my own)
One Woman's Quest 