Many leaves in the schoolyard blowing.
Many children at recess playing.
The wind erased the blackboard,
The bell emptied the schoolyard.
Many leaves and many seasons
And wisdom with its myriad reasons.
Even if the lesson is erased
You’ll know, the learning’s not effaced.
Tell me a story mother
All the hospital windows
Are black with snow
Tell me a story mother
Nurses are gathering fire
Doctors are measuring wire
Tell me a story mother
When does our care
For what is ours wear
Tell me a story mother
What we lose in time
We receive in kind
Tell me a story mother
Memory is a medicine
Exceeding what has been
Tell me a story mother
Soil is buried in soil
And grief in toil
Tell me a story woman
Death is the meaning
Of mother in my flesh
Tell me a story mother
The sick are waking
It is night and it is morning
Flower of kisses
Luminous arc between lovers
Flower of God
Withering when I grasp it
Flower of blood
Coagulates violence
Flower of peace
Elsewhere a weed
Flower of starlight
In clusters
Flower of time
Blossoming space
for Alistair MacLeod
Sometimes things are the same everywhere,
That’s also what you taught me.
There’s mist and wind and the sound of waves,
The sound of rain and time passing,
The sound that home is never far
And follows you like a sea, wherever you go.
They could not decide what to take first,
So they took everything.
They took everything and promised to return,
So the others took the nothing
They had left and hid it away.
They had no trouble hiding it.
Weeks later they returned
Demanding the nothing they left behind.
The others refused, they refused,
Claiming nothing was all they had.
So they went away to plan.
They sent their scouts
To search for the nothing.
They searched all morning.
They peered into forests.
They overturned rocks.
They parted the water
But always found something.
Determined to find nothing
They said to surrender nothing
Or be slaughtered,
But the others refused
And prepared for battle.
So the battle lasted years.
They forgot about nothing
And kept killing over nothing.
Bodies burned into nothing.
Nothing was left behind.
Legend has it, nothing was never found.
To this day there is still nothing.
All at once nature was old;
It touched the roots of gold–
And darkness, made of light,
Cast a shadow vast as night.
Soldiers wouldn’t fight.
Drones got lost in flight.
Artists grew so cold
Marble left them unconsoled.
All at once we saw
In each a universal flaw:
Earth was a child
Born to be reviled.
Believers couldn’t believe,
Mourners couldn’t grieve.
Warmongers went to hell
For the sin of living well.
Politicians couldn’t lie.
Polluters wouldn’t try.
Everything went opposite
The direction of profit.
All at once the earth died;
Civilization, left untried–
And darkness, made of night,
Cast a shadow vast as light.
From desperation repossessed,
From marriages divorced in debt,
From suicides in garnishment,
One coin of empire in demise.
From families in ruin,
From homes that were lost,
From hope appropriated,
One coin of empire in demise.
From mask of Mammon,
From fear and war,
Just such interest is accrued,
One coin of empire in demise.
The cries of hyenas are human cries
The teeth of the lion are human
Jaws of crocodiles are human jaws
Our blood changes into venom
We destroy our own young
We hunt the young of others
We smell slaughter on the wind
Why then consider ourselves separate
If we walk in animal footprints
Why number our tribes
If migrations end in murder
Why give a name to creation
If the same wild God destroys it
The most noxious landfill is language.
Books are polluted; libraries, dump sites.
Due to toxic levels of pathetic fallacy
Bookstores recall infected books;
Greenpeace intervenes poetry readings;
Poets are fined for offshore word spills.
Why must a cloud be forever lonely?
Why must the sea be always cruel?
Books burn by their own hands.
Lexicon’s toxic waste contaminates
Our graves and poisons our shadows
From which we rise to stain the world.
Salvatore Ala 