Category: Nature

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The Fourth Thursday In November

by Mankh

You give but
where do you get
from
so as to give?

Did someone give to you?
And where did they get from?
or did it come
from inside of you or
from the sweat of your labor?

Did the Earth give it to you
or did you just take,
or give and take?

Or did you receive
and now give?

Giving
is no guarantee of good things.
The Native Peoples gave
but were taken
advantage of
by those who only wanted
to get, to take
without giving back
but now pretend for a day
by giving to each other.

Research the Pequot massacre — 1637,

also the Wampanoag,
also the dinner modeled after a dinner
in a 1927 book Northwood: A Tale of New England
with an epigraph:
“He who loves not his country, can love nothing.”
That “country” was super-imposed over Native lands,
teaching school kids to forget the Earth,
forget their Mother,
forget the Natives
except for some fairy tale slower than normal
but still fastfood meal
before it’s buy buy buy
so as to give give give.

Did the Earth give it to you
or did you just take,
or give and take?

~ Mankh (Walter E. Harris III)
allbook-books.com

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Souwasset Harbor

Souwasset* Harbor
(*the Setalcott Nation name for the region before “Port Jefferson”)
for Barbara Southard

The sounds the water makes
reaching the sand, myriad little rocks
with various shapes, sizes, curvatures —
all reminders of devotion

geese glide in to pause
and preen, spritzing water on themselves,
flapping wings to dry,
water sparkling sharply with
wavy reflections of sunlight
like large chunks of shattered glass in motion
but harmless

two toddlers playing in the sand
as focused as if landing
a
jet
airliner

before getting back to the concrete streets,
sighting a sparrow darting
through the August grasses

so much interplay and relating,
this is the stuff that Summer days
are made of.

Some quiet Winter afternoon
when your garden is poised
with seeming stillness,
look
for the interplay,
then look again.

~Mankh (Walter E. Harris III
Allbook-Books.com

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In What Image?

In what image have habitats been destroyed?

Small patch of woods in suburban landscape
chopped down for baseball fields and deck hockey rinks.
Destroying creation for recreation.
In what image? Baseball, hot dogs, apple pies and Chevrolets?

“Image” is an “artificial representation that looks like
a person or thing, copy, imitation, phantom.”

In what image have habitats been destroyed?
In God’s image?
As in “Then God said,
‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.
And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea
and over the birds of the heavens
and over the livestock and over all the earth
and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’”

Is this the blueprint for overpopulation, franchising and global corporations?
“And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply
and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over…’”

“…over every living thing that moves on the earth”
Is that the modus operandi for 24-7 surveillance?
Full spectrum dominance?

What’s wrong with the Winter image
of a snow-capped mountain
reflected in a crystal clear lake?

What’s wrong with an August lake
with the image of a forest reflected
upside down in still waters?

What’s wrong with the image
of a canoe gliding with fish and a clean river
in a gentle rain
under the stars?

What’s wrong with the image
of cloudy sky
reflected
in a dewdrop
on a flower?

If that’s not “God” then i’m an atheist.

What’s wrong with this picture:
a text with a photo of a sacred site,
oblivious that the site is slated for
the chopping block.

What’s wrong with this picture:
smiley family picnic
yet the trash they’ll leave
isn’t in the photo.

We don’t need to go to school
to learn how to
use our imaginations to make stuff up.
We need to look at what’s actually happening
and change what images we choose to copy.
STOP the choice of images of “sleek” “slick”
“sporty” “state of the art” “progress”
“because they’re doing it”
that destroy this fruitful world.

Let the Earth
breathe
back
better
and show us the way to live
with all the dizzying multitudinous array of natural images—
enough with the religio-corporate dominion over others.

~Mankh (Walter E. Harris III)
Allbook-Books.com