My Body Bears Witness to You

I catch a thought you in the corners of my day. The thought stays at my heels, a hunter tracking a herd of burnt-orange Musk Ox across half-frozen hills of ancient France. I am able to imagine you because my body is the downstream conclusion of your own dreaming. All I am is because you shot an arrow of consciousness through your children. Like tossing a rock down a well. Can you hear my echo?

I do not know what anchors my imagination so strongly to your Mastodon world of magic and shadow. Perhaps I am curious, like all my ape siblings, and mourning for unknown stories to enrich those you stained upon stone. What rituals did you create to fill the caverns of our forebrain? What gods or demons dogged your evenings, colored your days?

How did you see other enlightened apes? Was the Neanderthal a gentle lover? Did the Denisovan share their bodies willingly, joyfully?

I wonder if the genetic shadows I carry speak to a love-soaked weaving of bodies. The passions knotted between my twisting code speak to a darker outcome. I see no others of our sister species living freely today. Only their echo in my brow, my love of growing things.

Could you, deep time mother, imagine me sitting here imagining you, carrying pieces of your body in my own? Something aches inside me without a story. I think it’s you. Pushing my toes into dirt. Lifting my eyes to the clouds.

My body is longing for a center.

Looking back through myself, I see you. A speck. Waving on a hill. Mountains of ice retreating forever behind you.

Oh, Columbia, When Will You Heal?

The new century has been unflattering for you, Columbia, daughter of old dominions, heiress of colonialism and manifest destiny. Centuries of gaslit visions have presented you with a lengthy bill due to truth. Can you find the courage to reconcile imperial ideals with democratic reality? Your founding fictions of money-meaning and power-porn sound obscene in the mouths of your children. Huddled together, alone in separate homes, conjuring meetings and hook-ups on glowing windows in hands and laps, they begin to sense that you need an intervention. You have been living wildly, selfishly. The better angels of your nature have prepared a place for you to rest, if you are willing. To heal, if you are brave enough.

Oh, Columbia, where to begin?

How much longer will you tolerate the erasure of whole cultures, of a person’s life? When will you take off your privileged glasses and look your genocides in the face? When will a black man be seen as anything other than an object, or a threat? When will women gain control of their bodies? How many corpses of children need to be stacked in the hallways of your schools? How many children must be caged on your southern border to alleviate the meaningless angst of your forgotten rural poor? When will a human life outweigh economic fantasies?

Are you prepared for the coming crunch of climate catastrophe?

You contain multitudes. Under a salty crust of dying cells, your body is beautiful like the bodies of those you oppress. Forget these white devils, exfoliate them from your earth-colored skin with cedar and sage. Your teeming masses are longing to breathe free. They contain multitudes.

All the White Collars are Working from Home

I love working in my open-windowed home. 
I hear birds rejoicing and the click-click of blinds in the breeze. 
The inhuman stress of my work day is lessened 
Within this context of a bright and living world.