Wildflower Stew

This is a poem by Mary Oliver. I share it here to honor my friend Cinnamon Meeker who passed away October 15, much too soon, and who definitely didn’t end up simply having visited this world.

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from
his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

- Mary Oliver

From the Canadian group Moms Against Climate Change:

I’ve been away for awhile. Actually I haven’t physically been anywhere, just shifted my focus to a book I’ve been wanting to write for a long time. Working title is “The Garden of Delight” and I’ll probably be sharing bits of work-in-progress on here from time to time in addition to a few passing comments. For now, here’s a poem I unearthed recently . . . .

It Is Only Natural

It is only natural
That your beauty should draw me here, beloved.

An eaglet makes tight circles
above my sightless eyes
and I rise and fall evenly
with the hum of your breath.

R Swan
1979

This is a poem I wrote when I was spending a lot of time hiking alone in the Cascade Mountains. It’s a love poem to a large granite boulder beside the Skykomish River.

Another day in a long long line of bone-dry, heat-wavey, pavement-baking days. The August sun comes up, the August sun goes down. No rain.

I wake up with a headache, I think from being dehydrated even though I drink plenty of water. I sit at my window and watch the sweet hill country sunrise; the dirty steel-grey city is like a veil over the sunrise that goes on anyway, pink over peach over rose-blush horizon, diamond morning star in the dark-fading to pale-blue sky. Pristine and perfect in itself, veil or no veil, the sunrise is there behind and beyond our unnatural constructions.

Some corner of me expects the veil to lift so I can see the whole sunrise unimpeded and all the stars at night, too, down to the horizon like in the desert, millions and millions of tiny sparkling lights, always there behind the sickly orange and green glow of mercury vapor lamps.

They are all still there. I know this. I look at the night sky and I see the absence of all those stars. I can’t look at the sky without remembering what’s not there. That’s why I see the city as a veil when I look at the sunrise. I know what it’s like without the buildings and the dirty air.

But what do the children see? Do they know about all the stars, not from some TV show but with their own eyes? Have they felt the hush and miracle of standing on flat ground in the desert and feeling the stars surround them like a jeweled shawl? Have their spirits been lifted from sleep into wakefulness on the wings of a perfect sunrise? Will they have these touchstones to go back to as they try to navigate their way through the rough years ahead?

What more could we give our children than the sense of all life on this planet moving in harmony with the sun coming up, the sun going down, all the rivers flowing, the pounding surf, the magnificence of a snowstorm, the obliteration of a heat wave, the whimsical winds of change, the enduring serenity of the mountains? Will we encompass it all and find our true place once again?

Photo: Eucalyptus plantations in South Africa go on as far as the eye can see. Escaped eucalyptus trees are found widely outside of the plantations. Photo: Petermann/ GJEP

This is a franken-tree emergency! According to an article in the Organic Consumers Association newsletter, the Department of Agriculture is about to approve field trials for genetically engineered eucalyptus trees - 260,000 of them - without even conducting an Environmental Impact Statement to assess potential negative effects.

The company ArborGen wants to conduct 29 field trials. Here’s a quote from Anne Petermann of the Global Justice Ecology Project:

“Scientists at Duke University in North Carolina have created pollen models that show tree pollen traveling from a forest in North Carolina for over 1,000 kilometers northward into eastern Canada. Scientists researching sterility in trees have admitted that 100 percent guaranteed sterility in GE trees is impossible. This evidence implies that if GE trees are released into the environment, widespread and irreversible contamination of native forests cannot be prevented.”

And if that doesn’t make your hair stand on end, try this:

One of the experimental GE tree varieties is a known host for cryptococcus gatti, a fatal fungal pathogen whose spores cause meningitis in people and animals.

Comments are being accepted by the USDA until July 6, 2009. Here’s a link to a form for making a comment to the USDA. Let’s stop this before it even starts.

Juxtaposition

Ragged leaves hanging limp in the heat

Hole-y and spotted against the steely sky

The delicate shades of living green

Dark green, light green, bright green, bless my eyes

Relieving the pain of metal and pavement

Wafting a hint of oxygen my way

as they tremble in a passing breeze . . . .

. . . . swan . . . .

Here’s another one for May Day. I love sunflowers. The juxtaposition in this video would do any guerrilla gardener proud.

You might celebrate May Day by dancing around with flowers in your hair. Or you might celebrate it by marching down the street as a worker or an immigrant to stand up for your rights and fight oppression. Or you might send out a distress signal if you’re at sea and pirates attack - May Day! May Day! (which comes from the French m’aidez - help me!). Where did a holiday with such a wide range of meanings originate?

The roots of May Day go deep into the earth and way back in time to the ancient Celts and Saxons celebrating Beltane, the day of fire. It was a feast of fertility and bonfires to call back the sun after the long cold winter and prepare the ground for planting. A May Queen was chosen and young men and women danced around the May Pole romantically entwining long ribbons from the pole as they danced. When the church arrived in Britain, this was of course banned. Then reinstated, then banned. It’s had a sketchy history. The Puritans hated it but it kept coming back. So it got kind of toned it down in this country as the Puritans tried to turn it into a playful holiday for children.

But then in the US and Canada, May Day became a working class holiday after the national strikes of May 1, 1886, calling for eight hour workdays. In Chicago, the police attacked the marchers, killing six of them. The next day as the workers marched again in Haymarket Square to protest police brutality, a bomb exploded in the midst of the police, killing eight of them. The police arrested eight trade unionists claiming they threw the bomb, a charge that was never proven. Some said that the bomb was dropped by an agent provacateur of the police trying to run away after being recognized by the crowd. Despite not being able to prove that they had anything to do with the bomb, four of the anarchists were found guilty and executed by the state of Illinois.

In Paris, in 1889, the First International proclaimed May 1 as an international workers holiday in memory of the Haymarket Martyrs and the red flag became a symbol of the blood of the martyrs for worker’s rights. For a list of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) May Day events from Edinburgh to New York City to San Francisco go here:
http://www.iww.org/en/event/2009/05/01/day

In Salem and Portland, Oregon - March and Rally for Immigrant and Workers’ Rights: Economic Justice for All! For more information go here:
http://willamettereds.blogspot.com/2009/04/may-day-events-in-salem-portland.html

I like this is version of May Day from In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre http://www.hobt.org in Minneapolis Minnesota:

Our MayDay Parade, Ceremony, and Festival has always been rooted in two important traditional celebrations—the celebration of the “GREEN ROOT” of Earth’s green energy rising in Spring, and the “RED ROOT” of human work energy rising from mind, heart and hand.
Our theme this year celebrates the merging of the red and green energies of the world. We cheer on the great merging of the human social justice movements with the environmental movements to remember humans as responsible relatives of the earth.
As we experience the fall of our economic systems built on debt, consumer waste, the theft and sickening of earth resources, we gather to rebuild an economic system that protects and sustains our Earth as a “Common Treasury for All.”

Traditional May Day song:

The fires light, this merry night, upon the first of May,
We’ll merry meet, and summer greet, now Winter’s gone away.
•
•
Chorus: Beltane Night, the time is right, the life-force doth awake.
So dance and sing, around the ring, and Summer magic make.
•
•
The gorse and broom and heather bloom, and goodly grows the grain.
In every tree, new life we see. The summer comes again.

New life’s alive, in every hive; new nests in every tree.
Be free and fair, like earth and air, like bird, and hare, and bee