only our feet all the more surely trample our earth.

spring melt, river valley path, april 8th/08

aster skeletons, river valley, april 8th/08

Living in this province makes my brain hurt. This is not a new revelation, but it has been hurting extra much since the whole first-nuclear-power-plant-in-Alberta business appeared last year. Actually, it would still hurt even if I lived in anywhere else, because the very fact that a lot of people think it's a really good idea to build a nuclear power plant outside of Peace River has a lot of impact beyond provincial borders. The fact they want to build one enough to make my brain hurt, but it's not only that it is some misguided attempt to reduce greenhouse emissions (which does not work anyway!), it's to help power the oilsands! So we can get all the oil out of the ground faster & destroy the atmosphere & the boreal forest even sooner, & as a bonus, increase the health hazards with upping the already high carcinogen levels that are popping up all over Northern Alberta. Super.

I can never get over these sorts of decisions. Sometimes I would just like to ask the people who make these decisions if they like their children or their grandchildren very much. Most people would say they do, & yet this kind of myopic, linear stupidity abounds. Seven generations? More like a month, a week.

* * *



Ko man dosi mamulite, par muzigu dzivošanu
Izplaukst zelta abelite un ka rita migla skan
Ko tas dos tev mamulite, ka tavs delinš nenomirst,
Atbildes nav
Tikai kajas drošak savu zemi min…


What will you give to me mother dear, for eternal life
The little golden apple tree blooms, and rings out like morning mist
What does it give to you mother dear, that your little son doesn't die
There is no reply
Only our feet all the more surely trample our earth



This is Joanna Macy's story about her creation and use of the Elm Dance, set to the Latvian folksong above.



* * *



This was inspired by the work of the musical group Kitka (along with the super-amazing Ukrainian avant-garde folk musician Mariana Sadovska); for their production of Rusalki -- Songs Between Worlds, they travelled to villages in Northeastern Ukraine to collect songs about the rusalky, the spirits of the earth/water/seasons (generally a creative force), but also associated with untimely death. As noted in this article here, these villages where the rusalky song tradition is the strongest also happen to be some of the hardest hit by the Chornobyl disaster twenty-two years ago. I have always been in awe of the rusalky songs, & haunted by the tradition of the Provedu Rusalok, & this coinciding of resilient songs & resilient earth somehow encourages me a little.



And so, I write things. (Not finished yet, as usual)




i)

on the shores of lac cardinal
a black moth flutters, over
the water, in the leaves of red poplars
& slick as a sturgeon she is down
in the shadows, singing under the ice –

i live at the bottom of the river
with indigenous sorrows growing
in my belly, soft earth in my fists
singing my way into the fields,
green thursday, first thunder –

ten years from now, a sky
glows with the eerie exhale of neon,
phosphorescent mushroom stalks
rising above the lake, electron spores
crashing & flowing on their way north –

there where the earth lies oil-black,
where you strip away the strata, peel
back the skin & pillage for plasma, suck
greedy at the bitumen pooling
under tar-black grass –

but i am still there, braiding
strands of mosses, sealing the cracks
& coaxing the beaks of crocuses out
from the moist nests, underground
birds with wide mouths searching for the sun –


ii)

i am not sure what they call
me here, but i think
they know me.

i didn’t stow away in a
seed packet, sewn in the hemline
of your baba’s coat –

i was always here,
autochthonous little song,
a thought, a green-ness

rusalka-rusalochka,
zelenka-zemlyanynochka,
from the pripyat’ to the peace;

did you know they
still sing to me, even in
chornobyl, those hearts strong

around the wormwood &
i send the black grasses creeping
back over the concrete

& oy vilitala halka! the jackdaws are
circling, clawing at the resonant
black earth beneath their feet

iii)

& here you are,
with your addiction,
province with the finest caviar;

& it’s never enough
when you know there’s more,
so slit the belly of the fish

dig in that curved knife
& scoop out the black-gold,
split a million atoms

because you think it will help.

o chorna voda!

& i will rustle along
the lakeshore, your children
are playing there

with thyroids like brittle
snailshells, cracked calcium
dissolving into a cooling pond;

frogs float dissolute and distended
in the swamp, silent throats bulging
up like moons, something’s wrong,

something is very wrong.

o chorne zillia!

& i am keening in the hollows,
deflated balloon of a crow’s chest,
blackened antlers of a moose.

o chorno byl’.

iv)

you’re the man in
a little house in a little town
by lac cardinal
& your wife strokes her belly,
baby’ll be with you soon

& you are waiting
for what they told you
would be the trickle-down
but if you listened beyond
the reactor’s humming

you’d hear it’s only
water torture, dripping flash
of that vast black-gold
endlessly running out.

& one night i’ll have to
come to you, come to your
window & its foggy breathmarks,
a baby in my arms, croaking
out a pulse;

later, at the hospital,
your daughter arrives, her
throat swollen, unsinging
& you remember that reflection,
crumbling into ash & earth

& if you listen, i’ll
be singing to her, i’ll tell her
you’ll all be gone soon,
& she will become the earth
without you

o chorna voda, chorne zillia
vona zi mnoyu

she’s a white swallow now
she’s the last green shoot
pushing its way through the
asphalt, she’s a quiet, growing
earth you’ll never see





* * *



notes:



rusalka-rusalochka -- a rusalka

zelene-zemlianynochka -- green dweller of the earth

oy vilitala halka -- the jackdaw alit

chorna voda -- black water

chorna zillia -- black grasses

chorno byl -- black stalks, the mugwort plant (often translated as wormwood) -- in Ukrainian belief, sometimes seen as a plant that keeps the rusalky away

vona zi mnoyu -- she's with me



-- lac cardinal is the proposed site of the nuclear power plant.

-- chernobyl fallout apparently caused genetic defects in swallows, one of which caused albinism

-- chernobyl heart is a degenerative cardiac condition contracted by many children living in the area hardest hit by the explosion