Benediction for People Working on the Earth

Spokane – Just the Way Light of Sun Touches the Backs of Earth Volunteers

By Paul K. Haeder

for the people who worked, for the people who shared Earth Day 2010 Takin’ it to the Streets, Spokane!

she came into life from glaciers imploding
basalt columns ripped from geological core
scarring earth, the lift of eagles broken
by the roar of the ice dam fracturing
giant blue heron settled eating purple frogs
they all listened to the roar, even the tribes

artery of river stone, the open wound
clear water, the gapping pools where Coho
settle for energy, in the collecting pools of sun water
where grizzly belly up and rip open dog fish
bigger than children, bigger than myths

this is a memory that isn’t lamentation but clarity
we can believe the history of our biophilia, our grand
hope for some reckoning with the wagers
who would sell every white pine for chopsticks
who would let the goo of arsenic tailings
settle into the bones of gorgeous rivers

you did fight that spasm, oddly enough, that odd nature
in most humans, a day of recapturing the light
when clouds and wind and Douglass fir trapped pheromones
sailed together on Gaia's wet morning breath,
the buzz of bees harkening in the same fold of time

this is how we live a modern ghost dance
no eulogies any more, just utilitarian ground truthing
hard fought battles to bring the purveyors of greed
to their knees, yet we drink the ferment of this life
in Spokane, making celebration and war one

give each other elbows, the full arm salutation
remember we worked like bees
pollinating a city we see as old, tired, but a future place
where some of us will ghost dance with salmon
and the grandmother lynx, where caribou herds will trample lichen
for miles . . . . we believed and did . . .

. . . so children will gather polished river stones from
the very water in their blood
pure, clean, and more than a dream
because of us, each one of us together.