Thursday 3 April 2014

Happy Birthday Jane!

Today is Dr. Jane Goodall's 80th birthday. Dr. Jane is the most inspirational, influential, amazing, and delightful primatologist. When she ventured into Gombe in her twenties, nobody knew anything about chimps. Now we know that they're the best animal ever. :) I love chimps, I love Dr. Jane, and I have since I was six years old.

lift a
long purple hand
to her nose

When the chimps started to approach her, one of them touched her nose and was caught in a heartbreaking photo, hence the verse above. She named all the chimps, even when other scientists - "real" scientists with university education - told her she should number them. This is repeated throughout history, often in worse scenarios. Aboriginal children were numbered. People in WWII concentration camps were numbered. The chimps were numbered. To dehumanize, even when Louis Leakey said "Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as humans," apparently means to number, and we are so ridiculously xenophobic that we do this all the time. 

Wednesday 2 April 2014

A Concrete Creek

tibetan prayer flags
stand out better
against concrete.

I am angry. I'm in the Rockies at the moment, and today I went for a walk near a creek that's been lovely for years, until the Alberta flood, and now it's dead. Absolutely dead. It used to be a beautiful creek, full of nooks and crannies, pools and rapids.... It was glorious. Nestled into the mountains was this body of water that entranced me, a prairie girl.

Then there was the Alberta flood. People love nature, so they moved closer to the creek, right onto its rim. The creek is usually a trickle of water in a huge basin, swelling in the spring, but that year it flooded right over. Everything was in disarray. The water took trees and boulders with it, and by the time I was back there, the water had smoothed it out and the trunks were deposited everywhere.

Well, if the water had smoothed it out, why don't we continue? The bulldozers moved in. The other heavy machinery moved in. It was scooped out - to make more room for people! - and now it's being paved with boulders almost as big as the natural ones but really really square. Terrifyingly perfect. It's disgusting.

This seems to be the nature of humans. Love, kill. We don't realize that we are part of an interdependent web of life, that we not only need the environment but are part of the environment. If we destroy the life around us we destroy ourselves, but we seem caught in this cycle. Near the creek, there's a house with bright Tibetan prayer flags, and they looked nicer against the backdrop of nature. From CTV:


Tuesday 1 April 2014

I Made You Laugh Once

A couple of days ago at a coffeehouse, my friend said "Your poem was very interesting. What was it about?"

Um. Well.

I tried telling him the plot, as it was a narrative poem, but he'd already heard that. I left it at that and thought about it for the rest of the show. The best answer I could come up with, after thinking for quite some time, was "I was trying to solve a mystery." The mystery in question was frivolous, but I realized that this is what all my poems are - not necessarily about something, but a process. A journey. Often I start with just a few words and see where they take me, stealing other words from previous, rough poems. Often - relatively often, recently - I decide I need to write a happy poem, and then inject a cruel twist and it joins my collection of not-so-happy poems. Today, I was determined to finally finish a poem with words that have been floating around for weeks:

i made you laugh
once.

During April - Camp NaNoWriMo and Poem a Day - I won't post entire poems, but I will post bits and pieces.

i don't know if now
we are talking about old house
insulation because we are
so desperate to hold onto
conversation, or because
we have run out of things to say.