On the second day of the Kairos Center’s Moral Policy in a Time of Crisis conference last fall, Mikaela Curry shared a powerful poem during the panel on ecological devastation. Mikaela is a community organizer and environmental scientist, with advanced degrees in biological science. She served on the steering committee for Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and has been active in the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival since it started in its first season of direct action in 2018.
Watch the video and read her poem below:
Here’s water, but don’t drink it.
Maybe try not to even think it.
It creates with us and beyond us
in our bodies and our wells
in our futures and our cells.
The cost is our lives, as they sell us lies.
This isn’t the only way, this is just how they are getting paid.
What we do to the land we do to each other,
disconnected from relationships
watch all the ways power will call us ‘other’.
to keep us from calling ourselves sisters and brother.
The scars of this country, our wounds, not healed;
closed and festering while their narratives keep lecturing
on economies and measuring the numbers of their wealth.
while people pay the price with their lives and their health.
Here is water within us; moving, rising.
It’s not surprising the crisis seen coming,
pushed aside for the constant accommodation of capital,
the narrative that it’s only practical
to use people and nature as obstacles, commodities or political opportunities,
isolating us from our own communities,
push us apart into silence and thoughts competition.
So, we are distracted from our mission, which is to gather into action.
Look at how to heal how to care.
We can have what is right
we can have what is fair.
But it’s not even enough to be in alignment
to understand the crisis, the climate.
This turbulent Empire; reliant on catastrophe and distress
to dispossess us, to oppress us and repress us, while they name it progress.
It’s not just the crumbling infrastructure and all the ways that ruptures,
it’s the teeth marks on our lives, the way something can scrape, even when it’s gone.
It’s the forests that are not disappearing, they are being stolen, are being raped,
While the waters flood, fires rage, the earthquakes;
desecrated, molested, and sold
cut down and replaced by imitations of itself,
a caricature of the world we can have,
but without the root of complexity of soil,
of relationships, of interwoven understanding,
everything washes away
the flooding comes again and again,
remnants of life, torn flags of surrender in the bear branches along the edges of everywhere.
The bodies under the pipeline road,
the slow trickle death.
Here’s water, don’t drink it.
Maybe try not to even think it.
How can you when there’s holes in the ceilings. the neighbors are being evicted,
the foundations are shaking,
everything is breaking,
enabled by exploitative lawmaking,
but also, when silence is the trail.
we know we can’t be silent.
But it’s beyond our words all this violence.
It’s where we put our bodies
it’s the silence from our bodies,
watch the bodies who are forced out of their bodies
Our bodies, the cost of our health constantly measured against the hoarding of wealth.
The cost of this extractive war economy is death.
Structural reasoning cannot bargain this away with some new jargon,
here we are called an apocalyptic Jubilee.
It is beyond you.
It is beyond me.
But no one else is coming to do this for us.
Here’s the water, don’t drink it.
Here’s the future for my child.
Here are some places someone might call wild.
Here’s the pleasure of sweet air,
the relief of breath without choking
of systems repaired beyond voting.
Here’s the mountain which will not grow back.
Here’s the absence of too many things,
The erasure of what’s still tending, what can start healing, what can be mending,
but not while the sleek blade of this apparatus keeps cutting away,
keeps the arrangement of destruction and production as if this is the inevitable conclusion. Instead of what it is; a violent strategy of delusion and confusion,
an arrangement of fault solutions.
This great chain of being undermines our potential.
The hierarchy seeped into the mundane,
the violent campaigns to maintaining real power imbalances
fed by the lie of scarcity,
the warfare of disparity to concentrate power,
these lies are loud, but we can be louder.
intervention is a practice and interruption.
And from us all care and co-creation
building power for transformation
for regeneration
for liberation without alienation,
for principled struggle
against structures that fight anything smoldering requires constant ignition.
Let us continue our friction into spark, into burning.
We are the voices.
We are the choir.
We are the flame.
We are the fire.
We have the truth of abundance
of enough
of each other.
Hear the jubilation of the future that is waiting.