by Michaela McCormick
While data centers, spaceships, missiles, and brutal policing
gobble up precious dollars driving us toward destruction,
those of us at ground and eye level
grow food forests, stand by immigrants, run health clinics,
and teach our children mutual aid.
It feels harder than ever
to turn toward shared well-being.
We are out-spent and out-gunned.
But growing numbers are again
pausing to question bloody iron-handed governance.
We are better than that, they say,
and we can’t afford the price paid,
not just in dollars
but in hunger, sickness, despair, and death.
Having not lost the will
to sing, play, and nurture each other
and all our earthly relatives,
we march, sashay, and dance
to make space for sprouting, telling stories, healing,
communing, connecting, debating, and resolving.
Those at the top of their garbage heap
may think we are weak and lost,
that we are fooled
by their fear/hate mongering,
by their greedy violent power.
Their artificial intelligence
is just that,
incapable of authentic sentient contemplation,
or caring beyond its own welfare.
It is a selfish, detached world
they are calculating,
a mechanized reality
with no clue of evolving
in concert and service to others.
Its vaunted speed is ultimate addiction,
stealing our attention
from the patient plodding work
of inquiring, listening, commiserating.
We with long nourished consciousness
know how to feed ourselves and others,
know too it is the only way
to sustain us all.
Like a food forest,
we each offer our gifts
to others in need,
as they reciprocate with theirs.
We complete each other
in grounded synchrony.
