can you feel the breaking?
i don’t know if it’s my heart, or something older
the cracks in my spirit are easier to see
they show themselves on my face
in the way my smile falters,
in the darkness etched under my eyes
i wake up from dreams
running in an endless loop
the skin of the earth cracking
molton fire spewing
childrens’ skeleton husks
dehydrated from the inside
hearts thudding, dust raising in chest cavities
the water of the earth running like the foretold fire
lakes and rivers burning their stories to the sky
telling about how they were ravaged
how their banks were used as dumping grounds
can you not imagine a day when the sky is painted red with the haze of endless fires?
when the black clouds of progress have spewed too much,
taken up too much space in the sky
where the ground shakes down our buildings, reduces everything to the same size
the soil only producing poison
my grandfather had a gift
could see death in his dreams
would sit at bedsides,
help souls pass over
and i have to wonder,
are the truth and future finding their way to me back to me?
the light which normally lights my soul is dimmed
the world feels somehow different, can’t you feel it?
that something out of sight has changed and we are now living in the last days
i have read the prophesies,
of the war of water, of the next culling
i have seen the brutality of our war against the earth
the way in which we seem to hate it
grind it up, rip it apart, spew our waste all over it
but i know there is life, buried like seeds, threaded throughout this prophesy
those seeds are the people and the light they carry inside of them
but my heart breaks whenever I see one of our seeds taken away
when they are pushed to hanging themselves in closets
when they are viciously beaten killed tortured, just for existing
when the very act of saying no is an affront
and have also felt the swelling of hope that comes from an act of resistance
when a woman stands up for the water
when a brother helps another up, carries him on shoulders until he can walk again
a greeting spoken in a revived language
the drums giving life to the earth
the dropping of tobacco and the cleansing smoke of pray
these are the pinpricks of light that cast my dreams into doubt
these acts are the resistance
these are seeds of hope
this poem by Francine Cunningham was inspired by Dominique Normand‘s “Two Women”
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