An owl winks in the shadows A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard Young male sparrow stretches up his neck, big head, watching—
The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green. Turn it sweet. That we may eat. Grow our meat.
Brazil says “sovereign use of Natural Resources” Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants. The living actual people of the jungle sold and tortured— And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called “Brazil” can speak for them?
The whales turn and glisten, plunge
and sound and rise again,
Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
Flowing like breathing planets
in the sparkling whorls of
living light—
And Japan quibbles for words on what kinds of whales they can kill? A once-great Buddhist nation dribbles methyl mercury like gonorrhea in the sea.
Pere David's Deer, the Elaphure, Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River Two thousand years ago—and lost its home to rice— The forests of Lo-yang were logged and all the silt & Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 AD— Wild Geese hatched out in Siberia head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang, what we call “China” On flyways they have used a million years. Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars, the monkeys, like the snows of yesteryear Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks. IS man most precious of all things? —then let us love him, and his brothers, all those Fading living beings—
North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders who wage war around the world. May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk Rise! and pull away their giving from the robot nations.
Solidarity. The People. Standing Tree People! Flying Bird People! Swimming Sea People! Four-legged, two-legged people!
How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist Government two-world Capitalist-Imperialist Third-world Communist paper-shuffling male non-farmer jet-set bureaucrats Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?
(Ah Margaret Mead . . . do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)
The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth To last a little longer like vultures flapping Belching, gurgling, near a dying doe. “In yonder field a slain knight lies— We'll fly to him and eat his eyes with a down derry derry derry down down.”
An Owl winks in the shadow
A lizard lifts on tiptoe
breathing hard
The whales turn and glisten
plunge and
Sound, and rise again
Flowing like breathing planets
In the sparkling whorls
Of living light.
Stockholm: Summer Solstice 40072