but i don’t feel like a poem, much and, i don’t feel like a poet, much
unable to wax
about the army of robins advancing in grid formation across the wakened grass, tilting their crowns in ancient choreography, listening, listening
about a cardinal beneath the forsythia in dulled morning light forecasting in my mind how stunning this scene might-could be when that gold blooms full in a cloudless sky next week
about the bald eagle i somehow didn’t perceive, and regrettably flushed from a towering elm tree as i stepped out from my door and holy fuck, i was just as flushed beholding the nigh colossus that was her
these seeds of words and gamete poems just atrophy, then die, inside of me
I contemplate if a future World— or future United States will allocate for and build Holocaust museums to exhibit and narrate the experience of the colonized, expropriated, interned, starved, tortured, raped, beheaded, bombed, incinerated, genocided, and mass-buried Palestinian Peoples?
If one day, an organization will break ground and dedicate “A Museum of the Palestinian Peoples” in Washington DC followed by satellite museums in every major American city — the first one, in Detroit. So that, we all, may “never forget”, again.
Remember that in these United States, we dedicated a National Holocaust Museum in the Capital of Washington DC, before we had a national museum to represent, exhibit and narrate the experience of The Transatlantic Slave Trade — the kidnapping, diaspora, torture, murder, rape, sale, enslavement and lynching of Peoples from West and Central Africa and their Black American descendants. The Transatlantic Slave Trade was one of the two pillars of all original wealth in this nation.
This then leads to the fact that we had a National Holocaust Museum in this nation, before we had a national museum in the Capital of Washington DC to represent, exhibit and narrate the experience of colonization, theft, genocide, internment, germ warfare, rape, dispossession and diaspora of Indigenous North American Peoples — the companion pillar of all of this nation’s original wealth.
The 100 Year Anniversary of The Great Tri-State Tornado
revised 2025 first published May 2011
The author, a baby, being held by her maternal great grandmother
Seeing the footage, videos and photos of splintered trees, the rubble of homes, first responders and devastated people — and hearing of the rising tolls of the injured, missing and dead and imagining the immense pain of all the fractured families — especially in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and in Joplin, Missouri — it is all the more remarkable to me that my great grandmother, Mable Agnes Brantley, then just one day shy of her 18th birthday, and her soon-to-be husband, Harry T. Ruble, survived the 1925 “Tri-State” tornado.
That tornado devastated the town of Murphysboro in Jackson County in Southern Illinois. It remains the DEADLIEST tornado in U.S. history to date: an F5 on the Fujita Scale — nearly 700 people died — but it is also infamous for its duration, sustained speed, length and breadth!
The rapidity with which this Trump administration moves — for those who had accepted incremental change, bureaucratic molasses and the long arc of justice as just par-for-the-course of the ‘democratic’ process and social progression in the US — those falsehoods and everything else that has been revealed in these last two months — is both mockery and insult added to our collective American (and global) actual injuries.
Capitalism and Neoliberalism paved the road for — and then engineered and constructed the super highway to, oligarchal fascism.
there is no fidelity save for the immediately local and physical, those easily-policed, -enforced spaces of the shallowed senses: touch, speech, sight, taste, smell and sound.
yet, constant witness, time or co-dependence, matter not
for
the mind, the heart, the soul will betray the oath, break the bond, abandon the vow
in the sensual depths of thought, memory and dream
political&ideological opposition is meaningless now
Billionaire JB Pritzker, the current Governor of the State of Illinois in an annual constitutionally mandated “State Of The State” address of February 19, 2025, questioned the near and long-term State of the Union — of the United States of America,
the relevant paragraphs are excerpted below with a link to the full transcript:
While US President Donald Trump né Drumpf floats the possibility of annexing Canada, acquiring Greenland by force or finance, and “taking over” Gaza creating a diaspora of 1.7 million Palestinian People, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov diplomatically re-invokes the Yalta-Potsdam system of agreements in his latest essay for “Russia In Global Affairs” with a re-invitation to the US — to reject its unsustainable and too-long unbridled path of global hegemony — and join the future as an equal nation of a multipolarity center along with China, Russia and nations in every quatrasphere of the World:
If birthright citizenship granted by the U.S. Constitution will be bastardized or revoked; to potentially exclude 574 Federally recognized Indigenous Tribal Nations;
if the U.S. is leaving WHO;
if the NIH, CDC, FDA and USDA are intentionally incommunicado during an endemic, debilitating chronic virus — with another potential pandemic on the global horizon — and may be permanently silenced or defunded;
if the U.S. Government won’t recognize, adhere to or enforce the United Nations International Criminal Court findings, rulings, sanctions and warrants on human rights violations and war crimes;
if the U.S. Government has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement both by action, inaction and officially; if the U.S government is abandoning climate mitigation and bio-diversity loss mitigation both by action, inaction and officially;
if FEMA is to be dissolved and defunded amid increasing, expanding and worsening anthropogenic-caused or accelerated climate catastrophes;
if Federal income tax collection may cease, to be replaced by tariffs or other regressive tax; or the working classes will be further over-burdened by Federal income tax collection even as the Federal programs that crucially and critically support or supplement life and lives are weakened or eliminated;
and granted, these institutions, agencies and policies are deficient, mismanaged or corrupted in some way or many ways;
if the two political parties in the U.S. Government are entrenched without possible legitimate political, military or civic challenge; if the three separate branches of the U.S. Government are in virtual lock-step as an autocracy; and, if there is de facto rule of the United States of America by oligarchy;
Winter Sky Sunrises and endless Horizon, Mountains, Forests, Prairies and Waters were traded for cities, skyscrapers and highways, built and named by corporations, governments and militias to populate with executives, politicians, engineers, administrators, marketers, managers, soldiers and subordinates — the wealth of the corporate-nation city-state dependent on the slow, then fast, destruction of all the Land and Waters and Beings on Earth
the Earth, on which i stood to take this photo this very Morning — and, the Atmosphere, which made the Trees, the Snow, the Clouds, and the Sky colors possible at all, this very Morning.
steel towers, stone temples, asphalt streams, and concrete rivers built to ensure that our feet rarely touch the Earth, that our eyes rarely witness Living and Being;
that we look up or that we look down, but, that we barely look around, that we rarely look within and that we that we never look beyond — so that we forget to remember.
the cities were designed and engineered for doing — which is the opposite of Being;
doing, which is a euphemism for undoing;
undoing, which is actually destruction — and which is ultimately,
a forgetting.
Forgetting to remember where we came from.
Forgetting to remember what we are made of.
Forgetting to remember what we were made for.
Morning of january 22, 2025
Our Elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the Earth is a gift that we must pass on, just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning. For the passing of Polar Bears, the Silence of Cranes, for the Death of Rivers and the Memory of Snow.”
the limineen | earthling, poet & crone 