full bloom,
milkweed, goldenrod, chicory,
aster,
thistle or teasel — i don’t know
they’re 7, 8, 9, feet tall
their leaf cups full of collected dew, or rain
the meadow is just all
give give give.
in fifteen minutes,
give or take,
all, gone
beneath a tractor blade
take, take, take,
take.
Continue reading “The Murder of an August Meadow”i still surprise them
even after nearly six years of quiet-yet-unstealthy,
devotion to them
they’ve never once held their roost or kept their forage
upon my careful intrusion, upon my neutral presence
to maybe know of me
to maybe trust of me
their survival instinct is so strong
but i still take umbrage,
playful, but umbrage, nonetheless
then i remember Nemerov’s words about their feathers
in our caps, our pillows, our coats
“The Distances They Keep,”
then i remember Kimmerer’s words about
the aweing ubiquity and incredible extinction of the Omimi,
Martha the Last, died 109 years ago come September,
then i read how happy fields of sunflowers are cultivated to serve as bait traps for dove hunters at my beloved Starved Rock – after all the lovely fall engagement and high school senior photo shoots wind down,
and of those who cruelly suggest their flesh is quite delicious
there is no honorable harvest among the descendants of thieves, of colonizers, of settlers, of “homesteaders” — i know this.
so, my god, yes,
stay shy, stay distant, dear doves,
there are many reasons, that i stay shy, stay distant, and in mourning too, but none as good as theirs
addendum poem:
“dove,”
what a lovely name for a gentle bird
what a lovely name for a newly-born girl
what a terrible name for a woman in this world
i Am revisiting the significance of this poem — first published on my former Tumblr site [kimtn.tumblr.com] in August 2012 and one of the first intentional poems i ever composed
this poem is derived from my near-drowning and out-of-body experience [OBE] when i was about three years old at a beach near Waukegan, Illinois while under the brief watch of my Finnish-American paternal grandmother, Dolores “Babe” Laine (shortened from Kumpulainen) who was often drunk
i am actually lucky that this near-drowning happened to me — and at such a tender age; my out-of-body experience imprinted on me and left me with the capacity to be open to, recognize and receive other metaphysical and liminal experiences throughout my life, and is absolutely part of the origin story for The Limineen and its previous incarnation as the “Accidental Seeker & Intentional Opiner”
beach obe
I open my eyes and ochre water’s all around
I’m underneath, but I’m not scared,
I still see golden sunlight too
I see your legs; you’ve let me go
and I think I’m down here all alone
I hear voices, but I can’t breathe
So I leave, I’m off to explore
But wait, there’s me! – that’s my face!
Do you see, that somehow now, there’s two of me?!
you finally see — the first me
you slowly raise her up
She coughs and breathes;
and the other me, She goes, She floats away
But, which one Am i?
now, i’m not sure
Am i real, or was it She?
pinpoint the moment,
the fulcrum,
where verdant green life
slips into hot summer crackle,
Sun-steeped leaves
aromatic, chamomile-like
parched beneath our feet
all those places where a hose will never reach,
a scent in your nose
reminiscent of a birthday hike
on switchbacks
to stand properly on, and in the shadow of,
“The Grand”,
a surprise, teal, glistening alpine lake.
was that the time he dove from the rock like a young god, an Adonis?
all those trips to Wyoming in August, in June,
begin to merge into one core memory,
like a hunk of young granite forged
and carried down in rock slide
then, carried all the way down to the valley, in my pocket
for him, to give to him, on his birth day.
i ran down that mountain like a gazelle, way ahead of them
it was the fastest and freest i have ever felt in all my life, truly
and, i astounded them, all, — and mostly myself.
then, a long, quiet drive back to
a newly dog-less city house
how did this all happen in one June, one August, or — was it two?
then,
the first time i felt a chill in months,
a different kind of crunch underfoot
the wind rained down
a carpet of leaves all about, in an instant
just as they appeared at birth,
all golden again,
but different, wiser,
a frost sets in.
Continue reading “fulcrums”today, i proposed to a hummingbird we had loved each other in the spirit world
reunited on Earth, now, finally,
beauty, will you please marry me?
i’ll promise to always feed your dreams
you’ll promise to always come find me
i’ll be our garden,
you’ll be our wings.
Rebecca Solnit of The Guardian in late July penned a piece which misrepresents climate acceptance, realism and planetary hospice solely as a harmful defeatism and doomerism.
Renaee Churches wrote an important and thoughtful response that will not reach an audience as large as Solnit’s, and is excerpted below:
We have already lost the climate battle and it is stories or opinions like the one above, that are preventing others from grasping this, and stopping us from taking the kinds of collective adaptive responses appropriate on a local and global scale.
The not-too-late framing is a dangerous one. It means people are prepared to wait for global elites to roll out the energy transition, to deploy such ‘solutions’ as carbon capture technologies, or other flawed techno fixes, aimed at making those elites wealthy, while not stopping the baked in warming that is already here and accelerating. It is only when we finally break through the not-too-late taboo that we will begin the work in earnest of adaptation to reduce suffering as much as we can.
We need to normalise talk about collapse and have a broad, society-wide, honest discussion about how we can respond. These discussions are already happening behind closed doors by the Militaries of the world, by Insurance Agencies, and the Financial Sector elites. So we don’t need more writers like Solnit advising the masses to effectively keep calm and carry on. Rather we need a clear-eyed look at the reality of our situation — as a failing global industrial civilisation.
Then together, as ordinary people, we can adjust, grieve and determine how best to navigate the great unravelling as it continues to play out in our lives.
Renaee Churches, Medium
this is my response to Solnit’s piece, which will reach even fewer people:
Climate acceptance and Planetary Hospice involve the refusal to endorse,
and the honesty to resist, further extraction from and destruction of the Earth and injuries to indigenous and marginalized communities of People across the World and to the remaining, marginally or tenuously stable or life-supportive swaths or pockets of wildlife, forests, tundra, deserts, wetlands, lakes, rivers
and ocean.
while washing dinner dishes
a hummingbird surprised me
feeding on a milk thistle
them overgrown “weeds” just outside my window
you see, it’s not just about my garden that i tend to
but about the things i leave alone,
that i let go,
that i let grow wild, too
//
i didn’t get the photo, my hands were too wet with soap
yet i really wanted you to know about this, really, to know this, about us, both
you see, we, errant human weeds, you need us too,
we’ll prick your finger
we’ll quench your thirst
we’ll tell you truths
I have been in existential hospice for a while now — not because I am personally terminally ill, but because I am experiencing and witnessing our planet die – the planet that we and all our fellow Earthlings from the salmon to the sycamores, from the gulls to the goldenrods, from the frogs to the funguses require for habitat — biologically, habitat is synonymous with life, with sustainable, continuing existence.
The Western World and the white-European capitalist and middle classes — that have driven industrialization; fossil fuel extraction; natural, animal and human resources exploitation, commodification and exhaustion; consumer greed and waste; and atmospheric, environmental and ecological devastation and destruction — will not ride this one out like some cyclical economic corrective shockwave or isolated ‘natural’ disaster — this is not like a stock market crash, an engineered mortgage crisis or a flash flood or rogue tornado that temporarily inconveniences the well-insured:
no, they, their children and grandchildren will suffer and die as well.
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
Dr. Albert Bartlett, 1923-2013
Ph.D. Nuclear Physics, Harvard University/Professor Emeritus University of Colorado
I can understand how ignorance, whether willful or innocent, is preferable. But now is the time for the truthful acknowledgement and acceptance of the catalyzation of unstoppable and irreversible feedback loops coupled with an accelerating rate of change projected to their reasonable scientific conclusion.
It’s also time for individual personal ecological recognition and reconciliation.We are pure consumers, we are not producers. We are human animals reliant on habitat and other species for our lives — there is no other Earthling species naturally reliant on human beings. It is essential that each one of us understands the gravity of this — and undertakes palliative, hospice and grief work for ourselves, for other beings, for other Earthlings, right now.
Being present as witness and participant, perpetrator and victim, and caregiver and care-receiver during the death of the World as we have always known it, is an undeniably crushing experience and responsibility — but simultaneously, it is also an incredible, incredulous, and humbling honor.
What a time to be alive, truly.
I don’t think anyone of us will garner a reservation on some exclusive, off-planet ‘Elysium’ – and I, myself wouldn’t want one.
Immense grief is the close companion to the immense joy and wonder that I still feel and experience.
there’s no sense
in gaslighting me
i Am already ablaze
nightfall
proceeds like this
small rodentia head under, in or up,
mourning doves perform a vigorous last forage,
hummingbirds, always reliable for last call, drink up/
rabbits boldly show out in numbers to spaghetti-slurp dandelion, plantain and clover stems/
barn and tree swallows own the lower troposphere
red-winged blackbirds
cardinals, and robins
in that exact order
loudly call everyone home for the night
the air surrenders to insects,
the sky — to bats, beautifully acrobatic /hey!/
cottonwood or black walnut trees will host owls on supremely, rare summer evenings
moths, beetles take the lamps
frogs take the sidewalks, steps, stoop,
walls, windows,
and eventually, the lamps too/
toads pace and post sentry on barn thresholds
deer passage through — or bed down
in the tall unmowed grasses, now properly – a prairie, a meadow,
natural salt licks — and halved, quartered and whole apples,
are my selfishly generous lures ’til autumn’s own bounty
coyotes herald the Moon
or the first dark train,
depending on the phase,
lightning bugs mimic eye-level stars,
golden-gold like our Sun and in asynchronous temporary constellations
raccoons strategize, then raid, but i know to expect them now
possums about their business — quiet, slow, sweet — these, my dear ones, stay a while, please
cricketsong
errant cicadas, what year is it, again?
and incessant croaking, banjoing, ribbitting
fog may appear,
then settle — or lift,
or maybe the night is sultry, still or clear
Continue reading “night falls, late july”first in a series
new geographies
All movement is thirst.
Hafiz
she moved out of the city of them, into the country of Her Self
in late January 2017, i impulsively yet instinctively, instinctually, bid on a house in the country — after viewing one listing on the internet employing the most banal search terms — and never having physically toured the interior of the house; after losing the first bid,
and later rebidding within minutes to spare, in the second round — my unfamiliar real estate agent was at the gate at O’Hare Airport about to board a plane for a Caribbean vacation,
i actually won with a numerological bid (against the agent’s advice) and closed escrow on March 30th; then in late July, i abruptly and stunningly — listed my home of 22 years in the city — for-sale-by-owner— without even a for-sale sign and telling only a handful of people — selling it twice, the second time, successfully — also using numerology, in August; then closed sale and left for the country house on September 29th —
nine months time – a human gestation.
Continue reading “from the inner city to the outer rural:”sometimes, in the mirror
she closes one eye,
pulls, spreading the skin of her cheekbone,
cheek, and jowl,
down, away and taut
to see what she’d look like
in repose
if she died
a gentle death tonight
and she and i were out of sync
and he and i were out of sync
and the crows and i were out of sync
and he and i were out of sync
and she and i were out of sync
and he and i were out of sync
and we were all,
out of sync
but mostly, i Am out of sync
so i stepped back,
and out,
then forward, and back, yet again,
then circled,
and waited,
waded, treaded, floated
it
out
to keep from
sinking
seasonal converts in droves
others, in situ, accidental, parishioners
we, longtime devout, are also among them
no one calls it a benediction
in congregant, we partake in a sacrament
of unblinding and mooring
our westered eyes and bodies
in an autonomic yielding
upon this
irrefutable
Continue reading “sunset at silver beach, part I”
