With Dignity And Grace

I wrote this poem about my friend Padme, who I met last winter at Earth Activist Training. Padme is a very beautiful spirit who freely gives of herself...she gave the best hugs! Right now she is in Algiers, Louisiana, across the river from New Orleans, working with the Common Ground Collective to help victims of Hurricane Katrina help themselves. She and the others in teh colective are helping community members self-organize to provide for their needs--since the government has failed to meet them. This is an example of the permaculture principle "the problem is the solution" in action. The failure of the government to compassionately meet the needs of the people of New Orleans is giving people the opportunity to create a system of self-governance that reflects their needs and their beliefs, to take charge of their lives and to regain dignity, instead of what the U.S. government wants to give them in the name of charity. Padme is in charge of counselling relief workers and people just coming back to their homes for the first time. She is of course giving lots of hugs! I send these words out into space hoping they nurture her. Thank you , Padme.

In The Green Fields Of Iowa, Padme Crowe Weeps

In a white clapboard house
down a dirt road that used to be a stream,
Padme Crowe weeps.
Sparrows twitter at the window for sunflower seeds.
She sprinkles them on the sill knowing
they’ve been poisoned by cropdusters
who bomb the fields surrounding the house everyday.
She’s afraid to breathe,
but someone must sing to the green corn
rising out of the furrows,
plowed by steel teeth so fierce
no stone can chip or crack them.
It’s not your fault, she sings.
It’s not your fault poison runs through our veins.
She tilts her head back and reaches with her tongue for the rain.
Just one drop is all she needs.
Look at that crazy girl, the farmers say.
She’s in our way.
Even the crows have deserted the fields,
scattered like buckshot,
headed toward a stand of trees
rumored to be holding out in the next county.
Padme’s voice soars above the bombs, the spray.
She takes a deep breath and lets her faith out,
the hymn in the seed.
The crows fall silent and drop back to earth,
watching the bugs flee the corn,
running from the conflagration
like the Vietnamese girl in the famous photo
from Life magazine, her young body aflame.
Flame is the enemy of innocence
as well as its revealer. There may be nothing
more brutal than to be a witness to pain.
There may be nothing more necessary.
The bugs never make it to the road
where they might have had a chance
to be caught up by a wind that would carry them
to a planet in another galaxy
that has not yet been pillaged and raped.
The crows don’t close their eyes.
Neither does Padme.
Together they open their mouths
and release the last drop of rain.
OM MANI PADME HUM.
OM MANI PADME HUM.
OM MANI PADME HUM.
If you lean in close to these words
you’ll see the black sheen of their feathers.
A blank reflection.
Everything.
See the lotus blooming in mud.
See the black diamond in the center of its petals.
See all your delusions be carried away
by a bright gold beak.
See the dignity of men as they go about
the day’s killing.
See the beauty of each swelling kernel.
Harvest the truth that is budding within you.
Their is nothing but this song that won’t end
when my voice whithers away.