Dear Island Nations Threatened by Catastrophic Climate Change,
Why aren’t you capable of holding two thoughts at once? Give up your language of the waters and forests, as we have. Speak instead of what’s to buy, who’s buying what and who’s flying where. Clear the timber, drill for oil, build the roads, but please, stay where you’re at! Know your place down there and drown if you must, into the dreaming sea.
Nocturnes are playing at our summer home here in the Cove. Rex and I are just back from Pah-rhee. They’ve finished the new security system and backup generators today. The view out our front window of the evening sun across the waves eases my soul after long hot days like these.
With gratitude, Newfoundland
Nightbird
When the Moratorium hit, I read The Three Pillars of Zen. While the town slept, I’d meditate on a sandbar as the sun came up. Soon I could fly a thousand miles in a single breath, over the Amazon, Congo, the last great shoals of fish. I heard the song of the big woods. I felt love, hope, and God coming from the earth.
One morning there was a fishing trawler, an old burnt-out destroyer refitted by the Americans in the ’fifties. Millions of juveniles of so many miraculous species lay dying on deck. The crew were pushing them overboard with plastic snow shovels. In the middle of the mound, a giant nightbird with iridescent skin and huge eyes flailed around in horror as men in yellow hardhats sawed off her sword.
It became clear, through the frenzy of gulls, that the World Wars had never really ended. Our weapons had turned against the very lifeforce of the earth, against the coming of the leaves and birds in spring.
For years I’d stagger back to the flats before dawn and rise beyond the ridgelines to watch clearcuts tearing from Brazil to Terra Nova, endless new roads vivisecting childhood geographies. Trucks crawled through the hairs on my arms, hauling away forests around the clock, twenty-eight loads a day to feed the mill.
I tried to get help but outside the clinic I leaned on an oak and felt the fear and sorrow of whole systems of life. I saw workers shoot camels from helicopters, ice mountains crashing, salmon choking in their own rivers, the land ripped apart by heavy equipment leaving deep pits where nothing lived. And I swear I saw demons of extinction, born of the fallen minds of man, rising out of the emptiness.
I used to be afraid of the visions, especially in the woods at night. Now I want them to come for me. I’ve become a nightbird and go out in storms looking for a fight. Instead, Kinglets, thoughtful little puffballs, come down from the spruce tops and tell me of all the beauty still alive on the earth. “Yes,” they sing,
“You’re all weapons of war now, hypnotized by hollow cravings and soulless machines. But birds still fly in the hidden lives of your hearts, where the greatest battle will yet be fought.”
Refinery Dream
I still dream sometimes
of working construction at refineries,
slinging wet cement up in the racks
with lime burning lines into my wrists,
and digging holes in soiled ground.
I’ve dug hundreds of holes at refineries.
There, I’m finally come out.
I’ve been a labourer for most of my years,
an anxious cog in the extractive circuitry
draining life from the earth.
Never got below four feet without hitting
the sweet smell of benzene, the essence
of insatiable fire-chested monstrosities.
The old reactor at Come by Chance was made in China.
It’s the only one left in the world that hasn’t blown
and is worth its weight in gold because it can handle
the crudest of crudes.
The latest dream’s a collaboration
between a Greta Thunberg dream I found
leaking from a cracked butane pipe,
and my dream, mine, the man with the shovel
and pick and pick and shovel and pick and shovel
and bones, wanting solid cliff to bring up in.*
It’s a dream worth its weight in diamonds,
because it can handle the crudest of corporate fascists,
wringing the oil out of upper management (premium extra greasy),
bosses (mid-grade), and the bosses baglickers (regular).
Everything’s automated,
their own AI turned against them,
offloading by the thousands
from ships at the jetty.
The workers have all flown off
on Gannett wings to the bird rocks
searching for five thousand superyachts
to feed the hungry young krakens.
… There, I’m finally come out.
I’m an environmentalist now,
a dirty word.
I’ve seen firsthand what they use us workers for,
how our suffering fuels their dreams.
And I’ve been to the bird rocks,
looked down through a hundred thousand slender
wings to the swell peppered with Murres,
watched Humpbacks chase black and silver
clouds into the cove where Savannah Sparrows
and Meadowlarks played on the banks,
and that Rough
-legged Hawk
opening her wings
as wide as the Arctic.
If there are any bridges left
for me,
let them burn.
* In Newfoundland, to “bring up in” means to be suddenly stopped or caught in something. The full expression is “brought up solid,” used, for example, when a boat gets grounded on the seafloor.
