My fellow Thinking Blogger Greenfyre argues with climate change deniers who would like to pretend that climate change is a political issue and not any kind of reality. But for climate vulnerable nations like The Maldives, there is no doubt about the dangers that are immanent. Whole populations will disappear if we don’t do something. Here’s a video of their President Nasheed making a moving speech appealing to the leaders of fellow vulnerable nations at the recent Climate Vulnerable Forum to act to make carbon neutrality a reality as soon as possible.

As he points out, approaching the issue as we are, each nation clinging to their “right” to high carbon emissions, is like signing a global suicide pact.

Please show your support. Go here to 350.org to sign the Climate Survival Pact in solidarity with President Nasheed and the rest of the climate vulnerable nations. And then do whatever you can in your own life, from the choices you make as a consumer to writing your representatives, letters to the editor, etc., to urge your leaders to do what they must in Copenhagen.

Why I love her

Sheltering under this opened umbrella
a pituitary parasol of parabolic
colors, emanations of the unifying embrace
of she I loved before I knew her
whose hair strand is the corner of a market stand
in Darfur, a blinked eyelash a family
dinner table of waspish mediocrity.
The inviolability of sufficient for our needs
screams like a stark reminder of the march
of sensory soldiers
unified only by a pole of
consciousness, the arbitrary skin fences
of yours and my stories
mere wisps of ether ,
vortices in her dance.

Mary with her ragged clothes
and unknown violation
in that dark night of the soul
mirrored in her bottomless almond eyes
like the horror of every woman
afraid to show her face beneath her veil,
her intellect beneath her place,
that vast moonlight of divinity reflected
in softest cafe au lait skin
responding to electric touch,
whipping the frenzy of energy itself ,
the male sword plunged against his brother’s breast
for cash, with nary but the gliding of a palm
on a warm sensate field of short dark hairs
standing like soldiers in obeisance of place and duty.

Who whipped her neck around,
like some awkward rubik’s cube?
Someone’s daughter or wife
in a parking lot
beneath the shadow conspired by two streetlights?
Who slit the insides of her thighs like an orange
peeled before a morning breakfast?
What monster did not see
her divinity, her beauty,
her sideways glance
as proof of her eternal beauty,
her testimony to their evil, before
they laid the black tarp of autopsy over her
and laid her to rest out back of the old church?
The monstrosity of the violation
of the goddess of us all,
the breather of life into our every broad armed inhalation,
was obvious to us later in the funeral parade
of silk and ceremony.

It is said by ancient tribes that in this wiling death
she undergoes beneath my stabbing sword at night,
that petit mort
under full moon’s watchful glow,
is a sacrifice of tears.
She is the queen of mercy
mother to a field of daughters laying down under a foreign sword
whose crop of babies are never born to suck and know
the nuzzle of this young girl’s older breast.

I dream of genies

Mystic was a magic place,
peppered with old men in roguish caps whose rosy cheeks
stoked by tankards of creamy ale
spilled stories of beautiful ladies
who sometime past
had smashed themselves on ragged seaside cliffs
but still walked wailing under sweeping lighthouse beams
on moonlit nights cast over the rocky beach.
So much better than the serious doctors with their stiff
white coats and so neatly trimmed
gray side-burns who packaged fear in words like leukemia,
alopecia or other obscure latinates, disease
dispensed in measured tones
in crowded rooms of children waiting to hear their fate.
I knew when we went to the local mall to meet
Jeannie that she, with her soft magic,
could heal my wayward cells
and draw them back into motherly line from where she
sat on her red velvet chair in pastel purple robes
to dispense the love and soothing I craved deep
in my broken marrow.
I knew too to stay far away from Captain/Major Tony
on the left,
with his tight blue suit and lapel pin
who would no doubt only pat me on the head
and tell me to be a good boy. I stood
just two children away from a miracle of beauty
at quarter till twelve,
but I suppose that hunger called
requiring a tuna fish sandwich to fill a hole,
a craving in the goddess’ stomach, like death needs
to hungrily claw a child from his parents arms
in his ravenous noon-time need.
So off she went just then
from her throne and I was left
with Captain/Major’s second wife,
a plumpish woman with dimples and tight,
curled blond locks who picked me
up in her cloying fragrant arms of cheap
polyester and efficiency
to tell me to be strong and good
and to listen to my mommy and daddy
and always to not complain or cry too much
as death plucked me from my peaceful
jewel of life and dispensed me
off to the grim reaper’s arms with a quick
and thorough shove,
to process the next
child through this cold and uncaring world,
that following page or flip of a turned leaf.

To break the chains that bind

A bird sings in the morning light
four chirps and a brief silence, a blight
of melody, let us not be tied to hate or like
or black or white
or day or night.
Let the crescent moon ring forth its reflected sunlight
of our working hands or running feet alight.
with the startling quakes that course our body when
pealed thunder strikes.
Unison voices singing together like
school-children
stopping a goal at a soccer match, bright
with red faced determination,
to love, to breathe,
to feel the chill wind race up our backs,
against our futile sleeves
that struggle against the sleep and cold,
against rain and lassitude that odd
determination to believe
in this human face
a young girl’s smile of slight relief
a small boy’s clenched fist
To overthrow that prickly wreath,
that tyranny of thoughtlessness.
The right to force our way
through walls of hate,
that sunrise on a morning hill -the curious belief
no matter how small
that we can overcome the division and strife
between here and there and somehow meet
in this common journey.
That staff pounding on the ground
like an unshaken heartbeat,
a steady knock of reason at the feet
of our those stone human statues, closed hearts walled off
with disbelief
in the magical, the transcendent,the over-
coming of that which cannot be.
That new dawn, the era of every greased
hard-working chin, piped veins pumping
through every flexed arm. The hope that we
can rise above what we are in pieces
in someone’s child’s half-peeled scalp to seek
that golden handshake or stolen kiss.
A tomorrow that shakes without boundaries,
without age , gender, or color.
Unsteady as an aspen tree
or a wave of wind through some new crop of wheat.
A tomorrow that comes with love,
union and belief
that those who do not now dare now share our tongue
might someday speak
tomorrow’s orange glow
of sonorous peace.

Everyone said it would have been a wasted vote, but at least I would have felt better about things if I’d voted my conscience instead of giving in to the fearmongering. (Granted, the idea of McCain and Palin in office WAS pretty frickin’ scary.) I read this at Common Dreams today.

Kucinich: Why Is It We Have Finite Resources for Health Care but Unlimited Money for War?

WASHINGTON – November 6 – Following a statement on the Floor of the House of Representative, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement:

“Why is it we have finite resources for health care but unlimited money for war?

“The inequities in our economy are piling up: trillions for war, trillions for Wall Street and tens of billions for the insurance companies. Banks and other corporations are sitting on piles of cash of taxpayer’s money while firing workers, cutting pay and denying small businesses money to survive.

“People are losing their homes, their jobs, their health, their investments, their retirement security; yet there is unlimited money for war, Wall Street and insurance companies, but very little money for jobs on Main Street.

“Unlimited money to blow up things in Iraq and Afghanistan, and relatively little money to build things in the US.

“The Administration may soon bring to Congress a request for an additional $50 billion for war. I can tell you that a Democratic version of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is no more acceptable than a Republican version of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Trillions for war and Wall Street, billions for insurance companies… When we were promised change, we weren’t thinking that we give a dollar and get back two cents.”
###

The man has a point.

Here’s a great website devoted to encouraging more constructive ways of dealing with difference. I’ll be adding it under “Building a Better World.” I found it looking for a synopsis of Jimmy Carter’s excellent book, Our Endangered Values.

I’m pleased and gratified to discover that Honjii of Honjii’s Harangues has awarded me the Woodie Guthrie Award for Thinking Bloggers. It’s enough to motivate me to return to active blogging!

Like any gift, this award must be passed on to retain its value, and I gladly award it to Greenfyre, who works tirelessly to help people wade through the misinformation promulgated by climate change deniers, in hopes of getting folks to wake up to the need to change how we’re doing things before it’s too late, and to Monte Asbury, one of the most thoughtful Christians (and goodness knows we need more of those) I’ve ever run across.

Here’s yet another example of how fricking cool life is: deep sea worms that distract their predators by discharging glowing balls they evolved from gills.

It is also, as a new discovery, an example of how little we know. We’re altering the chemistry that supports life on this amazing planet, and we don’t even know all the species we share it with.

Just a quick note to acknowledge that I’m adding The Pelican Web to my blogroll under “Building a Better World.” Here’s this from their mission statement:

There is overwhelming evidence that violence is the main obstacle to sustainable development. It is also well known that there is an intrinsic link between patriarchy and violence. Therefore, mitigating violence requires overcoming the patriarchal mindset in both secular and religious institutions.

The mission of The Pelican Web is to collect and analyze knowledge on obstacles to sustainable development, and to publish the monthly, free subscription, open access PelicanWeb Journal of Sustainable Development. The e-journal provides a monthly digest on current research pursuant to human solidarity, ecological sustainability, and both secular and religious non-violence.

I came across them in a message to a women’s poetry list I recently joined, about the importance of gender equity in the clergy. I’m thrilled to see someone doing this work.

We’ve been adjusting to our new lives up here near the Canadian border, far from the idiocy and lunacy of the Bible Belt. The kids are thriving. Last night our son won two awards for scholarship; at the ceremony I thought about how different things were down there, where he was struggling against his teachers’ irrationality and being failed primarily due to personality conflicts rooted in their inability to control what he thought (especially about religion). I can’t tell you how much happier I am watching him flower here in better soil.

Here’s a hilarious poem, “Storm,” by Tim Minchin, which demolishes new-age irrationality (and is wonderfully well written, with lots of brilliant and subtle rhyme.) My thanks to Michael Rothenberg, editor of Big Bridge, for finding and posting it at Facebook.

In personal news, my own poetry manuscript has been accepted for publication and will come out this winter or early next spring. Very exciting times.