Ode To The Tar Sands Blockaders

Ode To The Tar Sands Blockaders

For them it is the green blood of Mother Earth,

the xylem, the phloem,

running in their veins,

drawn like capillary action from the tap root,

anchored to the forest floor,

rising through the living cambium into the soaring, sunlit crowns.

Their arboreal hooches a flutter of leaves and streamers catching light,

their banners unfurled,

back-lit with the rising sun,

illumined in the amber glow of evening’s low slanting light,

their totem home alive and rooted to the forest floor,

which, like their xylem earth blood,

moves them to ascend from the tap root to the crowns,

This is the calling they hear,
from a shimmering in their green blooded veins,

the haunting plaintive cries they heed,

this, like the phloem moves The Middle Earthians from the canopy to the forest floor by night,

above the mangling din of full metal treads,

the buncher/fellers,

more clearly to hear and heed the cry of the low skimming loons at dusk,

the singing of the great humpback whales,

the cry of the wolf’s saturnian cadence broken,

by the howlings of Petroleum Man,

by North they listen for the songs of indigenous rising from the Boreal forest,

and East to the funeral dirges from the Ganges Delta villages,

South to the indigenous of the Amazon Rain Forest,

and West and west and west again across the water- until it becomes East again,

above maelstrom of metallic dissonance- the mangling claws and chain saws,

laying waste to one of the sacrifice zones.
It is here Middle Earthians have come to stake their claim,

here, a fragile line drawn on the forest floor,

It is here they turn into the maw of Petroleum Man,

here they draw their line for all the rest of us who sleep under our various SOMA opiates,

in our intravenous stupors,

plied so readily by the inducements of Petroleum Man.

In a great and sweeping tumult of material fury, ,into a wilderness fraught with things we have lost our way,

whirling in a gyre of things, and more things,

and still more things beyond surfeit,

then still more things.

Lost in the artifice of things,

we have dis-remembered the aboriginal wilderness,

from which we all are sprung,

borne away from the indigenous garden,

our innocent genesis defiled,

where once the xylem and the phloem bound us as consanguineous blood in the web of things..

the sacred pulse of life is now drowned in the endless cacophonies of objects and their ephemeral desires,

always fleeting away, never captured …

And so, here is where Middle Earthinas have come to turn into the storm of things,

a heartland place, a winsome name, Winnsboro.
here a quivering of autumn leaves grace their “Green Wall,”

close to the hydraulic hissings , the claws of the buncher/fellers

here a row of pine spars where banners are unfurled proclaiming a defense of the earth,

calling us all from our chosen stupors,

to join the mounting chorus to howl back a unison refrain at “Petroleum Man” and his

looming, Frankensteinian shadow, each of us to catch our own reflection cast on a soulless monolith of empire….

this, the fragile line we draw in our occupied selves,
as well as those who still do not see,

foregiving them their ignorance.

Middle Earthians will keep their sacred haunts in the crowns of trees,

each day their holding ground more consecrated,

their enduring vigil blessed more dearly,

solo from their perches on monopods….

~ but wait ~

listen, if you can….

listen to the silent aboriginal music of the xylem and the phloem,

shimmering low against the howling din of the buncher/fellers,

murmuring in the whispering crowns,

a piercing chanticleer of an air horn semaphore,

a clear warning for all far from this fragile line in the forest,

maybe, wheeling in the slowing gyre of deep remembrance,

we will hear the deep tap root song,

long dis- remembered,

pianissimo first,

then rising to forte,

singing in the xylem,

ringing in the phloem,

from the heart of Middle Earth,

~ Mother Earth calling us back home again~

We are all Indigenous