Pedals and Seeds

We have much to be thankful for. My life is bedecked with gifts in this rich country in 2012.  This Spring in melting America can’t come early enough. What are we waiting for?  The Arab Spring is sprung and carried on by Egyptians and Syrians to this day. I can’t say we live in a democracy, but I am not afraid to walk in the streets.  I saw 5 daffodils that had opened their yellow fingers. We have food, fast food and slow food, bakeries and ovens. We have Roseta

Stone and WeeAvatars and glass windows. We have waterslides, frisbees and libraries. Weeeee.

With all the gloomy predictions of climate change, the rise in FEMA natural disasters, we are a people holding our breath, waiting for the sky to fall. And if the sky doesn’t fall on us, we are petrified the oceans will rise to engulf us. We have the same fear as Chicken Little. Some of my friends are depressed when they see sunny balmy days in January. What! They want cloudy and bitter weather because it’s typical for New England. I personally think people take the climate change to a serious level if you are disgusted by good weather. Let your body take delight, don’t be a fusty, vainglorious egghead. Of course we have to work hard to stop carbon emissions and oil dependency. My head is scared; but I still enjoy completely a sunny warm February day. Be in love with nature “with no forethought of grief.” **

Instead of hyperventilating about winter weather, Susan and I have gone out weekly at 7 am to pick up trash around Weeks Bridge. Many Charles River elves polish the River parkway. Within a stretch of 150 yards we’ve gather amazing debris. Even 10 years ago I would have said, “!Que va!! The tramps and Harvard drunken bums, and the pooping geese, and the careless tourists are screwing up my view. It’s not my problem. I should complain in a letter to the local paper. Sh*”%*!”

Now, without cluttering my mind with blame, I clean the deluge. It’s our collective baggage. It’s a bit like Hurricane Katrina with a time lapse. Filling trashcans are as good as changing into a clean diapers: (cloth diaper of course).

What do we pick up? Hubcaps, baseballs, buckles, bottles, shot glasses, Mylar bags, parking tix. Lots and lots of plastic bottles, Gatorade, Dasani, Vitamin water or bug juice all in crackling wrapping. (More trash listed near end.) One old juice bottle stuck out of the edge buried under 4 inches of turf. Once I picked up a leathery object the size of a lime. It looked like a busted pingpong ball powdered with dirt. Well, it was a broken through goose egg. How wonderful to find that detritus. Cheery-o.

**The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things (more…)

Tianos call it land of mountains

Ayiti

The Santa Maria shipwrecked on coral, the submerged mountain

The Tianos dove and dragged the splintered lumber to build

the first European town,

La Navidad. Another birth in Ayiti

The pewter armor, the reckless white hunger plundered Cristobal Colon

left a legacy of greed

Columbus raked the Carib people with a sword in one fist and a cross in the other.

The scorpion tail of Spain lingers long on your shores.

 

The mountains of men

Toussaint, magnanimous fighter of freedom, ousting the invaders, captured in trickery Dessalines, commander of victory.

Defeated Napoleon at Battle of Vertieres

In 1803 grinding the French hard that they could not

Imagine fighting for the Louisiana territory

Handed over to the hungry Americans for just 4 cents per acre.

Ayiti, Ayiti, your mountains shrouded

Dessalines carved the path.

Setting a shining anger to ignite

The land of mountains now the 1st Black nation,

Ousting its ill-bred captors back to France,

Europe’s blood spilled throughout the land, pale with its fratricide.

The deep dome of sea awash in crossfire.

 

You did not spawn other slave revolts.

Ayiti, you rebirthed, driving a stake among European pirates.

Ayiti, Ayiti

You sprung tall from the Carib people as a palm shoots up

 

Ayiti You planted the dream,

Slavery casts a long shadow on its grandchildren

The ugly remnants woven in our words and moves

Dessalines ripped the white form the 3-bars of color on the French flag –when Napoleon’s men surrendered he tore the flag in 3 pieces and joined the red and blue, proclaiming the 2nd republic among the purloin American soil.

 

You stretched your hands to the sky

The smoke of your scorched island

Vaulted to the heavens.

Hibiscus bloom next to the papaya.

Ayiti, God hears your lamentation.

 

Two hundred years later, the Yankee beast

Twists the dagger of embargo

Steals the freely elected president

More bellicose lies from the NAFTA weasel.

 

The disarray

The poverty

Your daughters without a book, o Ayiti,

Your sons dying from tuberculosis, o Ayiti, Where are the forests, the water, the baby tasting its first mango?

The dust on the throat

 

As the farmer surveys the mountainside

Looking over the jeweled sea

Sparkling in the sun & rife with sharks.

Bleached bones of the slave ancestors on the sand.

Whispering the eternal song

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

Mes amis de Ayiti, levez les mains.

HAyiti, rise up.