BEB: Rise

by taylor kahn-perry

In honor of the student climate strikes worldwide, March 15, 2019

I.

I wish that the moon was the skull of God

and the tight rotations of light every night—

tiny beams of pearl glow—swept over Earth

in splashes of divine might.

And if the moon is God then our matriarch Earth

is the patchwork of a thousand heavy heartbeats,

mothers asleep with eyes wide open,

foreheads creased beneath blinding darkness.

If the moon was God, maybe it could halt man-

kind’s ritual beating of Mother Earth, the yearly,

hourly tug of her skin and seas and soil and skies,

the perpetual plight of her sons and daughters,

ripping her apart at the seams and each other too.

The children strayed too far from home this time,

have forgotten that Mother is home. And Mother

is bleeding, burning, warming, red hot and sweaty

from a fight over a will that hasn’t yet been written.

Soon children everywhere will flee homes (land

and each other), shuffle their bodies inside Mother,

search for a space as safe as the womb—perhaps

the electric bright rainbow of a coral reef or the

familiar dance of the annual shifts of seasons, that

rhythmic watercolor blending of heat and air and light.

(All lost now, like loose change or matching socks.)

Who will get what’s left of the seas?

They learned their forever lurch forward from

Mother’s children, how to want space and take it,

how to rise and spread and fill without a care.

And the forests? With their raging tempers, wildfire

heat. First cut down to fuel industry—tree limbs

the beginning of wealth and trade and take—

it’s no surprise they respond in flames.

Mother’s children have left her burning,

between rapid fire and glacial action.

II.

Unless

the moon is not God, but rather the light of

thousands of young bodies, slinging their legs

down city blocks with posters high and voices

shrill and proud. The kids born into a world

built on want sprint through streets in breathless

pleas against greed, prying their Mother back

from the grasp of generations of thieves. Body to

body with feet planted firmly on the ground,

the young ones, the brave ones, do not back down,

and chills abound, and this time not from misplaced

seasons, but from fervor and fear and love for thy

Mother and her golden sunflower light beams.