The Earth Dances

Thus, Shall we Dance

 

We shall dance, as the waters rise to sweep us under,

Clinging to one another as the cold creeps up.

 

As the fires near, burning all before them, we shall dance, locked in our final embrace, and thus they shall find us, as in the ashes of Pompey.

 

We shall dance, when the soldiers bang upon our doors, to take us away to the place nothing leaves except than screams and dead bodies.

We shall dance, to remember the disappeared, to hold their souls in our hearts, to follow their footsteps forward.

 

We shall dance the rains down upon the parched soil, the grass up into the sun. We shall dance the acorn out of its shell, the herds through their great circles,

We shall dance the great dance of the Earth, to the thunder and the birdsong, the cascade and the pulse of blood.

 

We shall dance our dirge to the tiger, the rhino, the great and diminutive wild brothers we have lost.

 

We shall dance to the Great Spirit, who sees all these deeds, all this destruction in the name of what you can not eat, what does not sustain, to sustain ourselves.

We shall dance, as we have done, for that is what we do. Thus have we always. Thus has it always been.

 

And if we live long enough, we shall dance upon your graves, and those of your ancestors, drumming them into dust for all this.

 

 

I wrote this poem during quarantine, when my family had a writing challenge to keep us entertained – we had to write something beginning with the phrase “we will dance” but in Spanish. I of course, wrote it in English and translated it for the zoom call! But it wasn’t quite the happy story everyone else wrote to cheer us up and pass the time.

But time passes, and little changes. Some things we want to change and some we don’t. And the things that stay the same seem to be the ones we want to change and those that do are sliding away from the wonder we have before us.

But we will go on.

Can we Continue Voting to Make the Planet Green?

It’s a great feeling to see progress. To know that attitudes can change very quickly. For the better.
I watched the movie Pride a few weeks back. It’s thirty years since the UK Miner’s strike. GLBT rights were stagnant in Ireland during most of those years. Yet now they’ve been propelled forward very rapidly.
I watched a youtube video of Mark Ashton (the person the main character the movie is based on) talking about the Thatcher era. He said it was set up so the rich could get richer off the backs of the poor. And we are more than ever under the yoke of the 1%.
Thirty years ago, global warming was ringing alarm bells and elephant poaching was a huge problem. Now we are again looking at the extinction of the few remaining megafauna on the planet and the Antarctic ice sheet is melting while a bunch of politicians are more interested in stopping immigrants and sending them home to die than accepting the looming crisis of millions left on land that can not sustain them, or house them, because of desertification and flooding their economic policies cause.
There are glimmers of hope, though.
Despite a setback in Britain the other week, there is some movement forward. In Spain, the ruling right wing party suffered a big setback yesterday, losing the majority in most regions and municipalities.
The Pope will hopefully remind us on his “much-anticipated encyclical letter on the environment“,
that a religion aged in millennia must think of the long term survivability of the planet and its inhabitants, and anyone who considers himself a follower of that guy two thousand years ago should see past the financial reports of next quarter, and understand that a superrich Christian is a contradiction in terms.
The Yes vote is a giant leap forward for Ireland, but only a small step for mankind.
But after Friday we can smile that we’re still standing.