Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry

What a Jar Can Hold

7/3/2022

Art by Cindy Wood
www.cindywoodart.com

I've been seeing beetles lately.
Big and small--scary ones that only
emerge from their underground roost
to lay their eggs on my stairway;
junebugs, loitered into July,
who don't like letting go, even in death.

The little ones, metallic, remind me
of grabbing handfuls when I was ten
from the roses they loved to snuffle and chew.
Mr. Ingber would pay us a dime
for a pint jar full of their copper
and opaline green. Packed
and freighted for death, them smelled
the way that people smell when they begin to cry--
rain on hot pavement--ozone, rot.

I was old enough to know
what Mr. Ingber would do with that jar.
I should have let them go.
And now I open that jar, in me,
gasoline evaporated, beetle bodies dust,
my small repentance, late.

Maybe love is never lost.
If so, it might collect somewhere:
Mr. Ingber's love of roses,
my love for the beetles here,
all packed inside an empty jar,
waiting to be opened.

- Chuck Madansky

Bearing Witness

9/5/2021

Art by Andrew Ferez

Sometimes we are asked to stop and bear witness:
this, the elephants say to me in dreams
as they thunder through the passageways
of my heart, disappearing
into a blaze of stars. On the edge
of the 6th mass extinction, with species
vanishing before our eyes, we’d be a people
gone mad, if we did not grieve.

This unmet grief,
an elder tells me, is the root
of the root of the collective illness
that got us here. His people
stay current with their grief--
they see their tears as medicine--
and grief a kind of generous willingness
to simply see, to look loss in the eye,
to hold tenderly what is precious,
to let the rains of the heart fall.

In this way, they do not pass this weight on
in invisible mailbags for the next generation
to carry. In this way, the grief doesn’t build
and build like sets of waves, until,
at some point down the line--
it simply becomes an unbearable ocean.

We are so hungry when we are fleeing
our grief, when we are doing all
we can to distract ourselves
from the crushing heft of the unread
letters of our ancestors.
Hear us, they call. Hear us.

In my dreams, the elephants stampede
in herds, trumpeting, shaking the earth.
It is a kind of grand finale, a last parade
of their exquisite beauty. See us, they say.
We may not pass this way again.

What if our grief, given as a sacred offering,
is a blessing not a curse?
What if our grief, not hidden away in corners,
becomes a kind of communion where we shine?
What if our grief becomes a liberation song
that returns us to our innocence?
What if our fierce hearts
could simply bear witness?

     - Laura Weaver

Here for Life

8/15/2021

Rafael Jesus Gonzalez at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 1983;
first blockade of MX Missile testing

I am here -
I wear the old-ones' jade -
it's life, they said & precious;
turquoise I've sought to hone my visions;
& coral to cultivate the heart;
mother of pearl for purity.

I have put on what power I could
to tell you there are mountains
where the stones sleep -
hawks nest there
& lichens older than the ice is cold.

The sea is vast & deep
keeping secrets
darker than the rocks are hard.

I am here to tell you
the Earth is made of things
so much themselves
they make the angels kneel.
We walk among them
& they are certain as the rain is wet
& they are fragile as the pine is tall.

We, too, belong to them;
they count upon our singing,
the footfalls of our dance,
our children's shouts, their laughter.

I am here for the unfinished song,
the uncompleted dance,
the healing,
the dreadful fakes of love.
I am here for life
& I will not go away.

- Rafael Jesus Gonzalez