WINDMILL FARMS
How many will it take to keep this thing in the air
Category: Environment
WE ARE ALL MOSTLY WATER
WE ARE ALL MOSTLY WATER
It rains on the ocean too
and sometimes you cry in the shower
The water don’t care unless you love it
and can see in each drop
the seed of the snowflake resting
PRAYERS
PRAYERS
The frogs out back
are singing in the rain
Not like Gene Kelly
in the actual raining now
More like the brave
in Remington’s painting
standing alone on a hill
skull raised above his head
trying to conjure back the buffalo
Last week it worked for the frogs
WITH APOLOGIES TO DAVID SUZUKI
WITH APOLOGIES TO DAVID SUZUKI
In the center of
a great Pacific gyre
fridges, bottles, nets and wire
circling like a rotting tire
a fast expanding garbage heap
larger than the state of Texas
and a hundred meters deep
Plastic choking bird and beast
who in error on it feast
A concept difficult to grasp
especially when forcing rhymes
It helps to think of a woman’s purse
multiplied a hundred times
REVENGE OF THE TREES
REVENGE OF THE TREES
There will come a time – maybe soon
When you have cut down and burned
so many of us that we will no longer
be able to give enough of our gift
to burn any more
Not nearly enough for combustion
in internal combustion engines
of chainsaws and D9 cats
It is true you will still have
your double bitted axe
and cross cut saw
But there may a be a problem
with the breath
ODE TO O2
ODE TO O2
You used to be able to drink the water
someone poisoned it
now you buy it at the corner store
There used to be oxygen in the air
someone poisoned it
not you buy it at the corner bar
You used to be able to plant a plant
someone patented it
JEANNE MARIE WRITES A NEW BOOK
JEANNE MARIE WRITES A NEW BOOK
When it rains in Biggar Saskatchewan
a bigger battle begins
Grass and grain sucking straws
to the slurping point
The sun trying as always to extract
far more than its fair tithe
Muddy waters swirling down drains
of gopher and badger holes
Settling through hollows of buffalo wallows
where the buffalo no longer roam
Remainders feeding underground streams
and deep raging rivers
If I put my feet or my ear to the ground
I can almost understand her last poem
Almost hear the next one
CHERNOBYL
CHERNOBYL
Nature breaking free of science
floats its angry cloud to Red Square
Science in self defense – seeds the clouds
A gentle rain falls with the deadly ash
No one is harmed, if you don’t count
trees and peasants
BLACK HILLS OF DAKOTA
BLACK HILLS OF DAKOTA
The red man mines his life for irony
while the white man tears the earth for iron
But treaties protect the sacred stones
as long as rivers flow and grass grow
Paper covers rock
in the Black Hills of Dakota
Gold in the Black Hills, end of treaty
Scissors cut paper
in the Black Hills of Dakota
But sacred stones outlive them all
Rock breaks scissors
in the Black Hills of Dakota
LAWYER RAP
LAWYER RAP
(or I SUED TWO LAWYERS FOR 18 MONTHS AND ALL I GOT WAS ONE RAP POEM)
The road to trials
is paved with miles and miles and miles and miles
of files and files and files and files
Piles and piles and piles and piles
of files and files and files and files
And I’m going down that road
wading through piles and piles and piles
plowing through files and files and files
And I think of all these pile of files and files
used to be trees and trees and trees and trees
And maybe these trees – some of these trees
came from woods where Robert Frost walked
the woods where paths in the wood diverged
and where he took the one less traveled
And I wonder how I got on this path
and how to get back to that place
back to that place in the woods
back where the paths diverge
Spend my days outside instead
walking through live trees
live trees instead of dead