Four poems for Rita Wong

Vancouver Poet Rita Wong Incarcerated for 4 Weeks 

for Peaceful Anti-pipeline Protest

1.

A handwritten appeal: one shows respect

by speaking honestly. The landscape

is losing patience. My faith

erodes. Your words

are incremental: liquid, ghosts, pure

resilience. This natural history

of the senses.

Lithosphere: this fabric of muscle, bone;

of bodies, maps,

geopolitical collage.

2.

As Dionne Brand wrote: a harmolodic

for the bruised planet. This path of centuries,

an attention

and respect. Deforestation, reigns. A tool

sits coolly in the earth: misplaced,

interred by time, and silt,

ten thousand lunar cycles. How can we live

if all else dies?

3.

They can’t take it with them,

I guess. The world’s lungs

fill up with smoke.

4.

The contempt

is obvious. You resist, for ecological health

and mutual respect, and in response, they place you

in a cold, dark room.

Injunctions, plead. Prompt: once more

unto the breach, my friend, once more.

Or close up the wall with our earthly dead.