Even Empires Down

 Here's a piece I wrote for my crew, Dancers Without Borders. We choreographed a dance to a recording of this poem in spring 2005.

Even Empires Down

Shhh…Can you hear it?

Something buried is rumbling

Something brittle is beginning to break

No matter the clever clutchings of attachment

A sinister myth, pridefully perched

Is finally falling under its own weight

Gravity must love even empires down

Her pulling is nameless

She doesn’t know words like evil

Or greed or separate

She cannot help but answer precisely

To the weight of neglect

The drilling, driving, scurrying, scraping

Of disconnect.

Shhh…Can you see it?

Her ice melting

Her oceans rising

The inevitable capsizing of an era

Is nothing compared to her boundaryless, watery embrace.

Fear is not as blind as we think

But is near-sighted

It makes up small stories

Obsesessed with the microscopic

Absorbed by the minutia

While ancestors of the millennia dance alone

We look away from the swelling tide.

Open wide…can you taste it?

Cold metal between your lips

(The centuries grumble with boredom and distaste, "Aren't you done with that yet?")

Genocides past are not so silent

The soil and rock never forget

Guns and crosses and blood

Time is a silent scream…

If you could hear it, you would cover your ears.

But now, thinly-veiled masks are peeling back.

Some will do everything to hang on to the lie

They will create media mazes and monsters

And try to bring it on

Saying that God will come

And carry them up

They will stop recycling

Delight in wars

And believe they are saved.

She smiles patiently at all of this desperate, hideous hiding

She whispers urgently to those awakening from the dream

Shhh…can you feel it?

Out of the debris something naked and raw is stirring

Something beating has always been there

Something breathing still stands

And courageously awaits the change.

Winter

There is a root descending from the hearth
This is an invitation
A journey into darkness.
The layers of light are not jailed by time
But rather freed
She teaches us how not to fear death
To judge not the fullness of nothingness
She silently reminds us
We are all children
My self a leaf
Which ripens and will one day fall
Making way for other leaves
An existance divined in the rot of earth.
Return
Return
We are all invited to return
To darkness
When we were nothing but a memory
She was holding us
Remembering our Mother
We come home

At the gate at Harvest Time

The fields are full at this crossroads.

The pond, covered with green scum, has its private life

No one coming for dinner here, except those who know the true power of algae

The sun belts a rebellious yell before fall descends

My child nurses at my breast as I write

Devine sacrament of all the ages of animals

We think we are not of them, with our motors and ink and ideas

But its milk that sustains.

Generation after generation of goats and pigs and humans

My son is here, and by goddess, he will drink

Sister bee comes calling again as we sit in a pile of grass and earth

I can still smell my blood and sweat and tears

Its only been six months, but you have made me a woman

Your little being, a harvest every day

You teach endurance and the endless ache of love

You are the lion I didn’t know was coming, but now can’t imagine ever being apart from you

You are my teacher. A reminder of flying things and sacrifice and god

We melt in the sun together under an unjudging sky

You touch the pages yet unwritten

Everything goes in the mouth.

Everything gives thanks

I give thanks, little one

For you, and all this is

I give thanks.