Dear Mater, Mr. Mountain

Poetry read at Hatch Gallery, Feb 2023 Climate Grief exhibition.

((Hey~ a year has traveled and now is as good time as non-time to share this poetry gestated in a grief ridden perspective, presented at the Hatch Art Gallery’s Climate Symposium. Catharsis in the making, there was then a call to understand the dimensions of mountain’s experience and mining activity. In offering an acknowledgment to the animate nature of RHYTHM, I posed questions to inquire into alteration and agency.))

Nurture
Desire
Rage

The confrontation of our complexity

I love myself,
But the self-esteem that made man’s machine indignifies our being
Which way to lean ?
in the container, confining us to complacency
refining our agency
to the productive perils

Our being, this shared body
thick skin
changing textures
soft green hair,
simultaneously stretching up and growing down.
Giving limbs towards grandfather sun,
receiving from the well of love below
like the standing tall people,
Trees
Honouring the balance of heaven and earth within themselves

Mater,
The Mother entangles into balance, challenging the reward of an isolated talent.
That sense of separation is a technology of power
divisions of class/race/ faith
make up the boundaries of this tower

but within a flower,
the rations of life reflect our relation
the length of a sound waves,
the spectrum of colour
the arms of the galaxy
the human body
conscious
the radical roots of cultural continuum

Dear mountain, who maintains a mix of materials
a mound of great energy
the threshold between underworld and earth and sky,
the cosmic womb of the pregnant goddess.
I see you gouged
Gutted
and sold
Sacred substances exposed
Carved and combusted
The secret of your seeming stillness; pulped and dusted

What is this?
Extractive practice
The reactive traction that builds through destruction

Magnificence:
muddled by mines

How can our relation to you as merely a resource be re-enchanted by the felt sense of shared source?

The follicles of your face, fed on by lichen
those beings who are a multiplicity
re-membering, co-constituting mutual horizontal exchange

A rebel ember leaves a cloud of smoke to provoke the dry dawning of regeneration.

I wonder if the truths written in the stars remain true while we launch debris, pollute with light, invisibilze our inherited ability to observe.

As the rhythms and cycles tilt of balance and spiral in coatic collapse, I wonder if the earth still breaths, I wonder what next will emerge from her womb

If this points tips over and falls, where do we land?