The Bioneers radio program on the ABC this week broadcast a series of thought-provoking talks from a host of social and environmental change activists. Some use poetry to promote change, others run salons in cafes across the globe, others practise deep listening. Drew Dillinger is the founder of Poets for Global Justice and his poem 'hieroglyphic stairway' is a masterful and moving display of issues confronting the earth globally and the river valley locally.
hieroglyphic stairway
it's 3:23 in the morning
and I'm awake
because my great great grandchildren
won't let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?
surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once
you
knew?
I'm riding home on the Colma train
I've got the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I have teams of scientists
feeding me data daily
and pleading I immediately
turn it into poetry
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech
I am the desirous earth
equidistant to the underworld
and the flesh of the stars
I am everything already lost
the moment the universe turns transparent
and all the light shoots through the cosmos
I use words to instigate silence
I'm a hieroglyphic stairway
in a buried Mayan city
suddenly exposed by a hurricane
a satellite circling earth
finding dinosaur bones
in the Gobi desert
I am telescopes that see back in time
I am the precession of the equinoxes,
the magnetism of the spiraling sea
I'm riding home on the Colma train
with the voice of the milky way in my dreams
I am myths where violets blossom from blood
like dying and rising gods
I'm the boundary of time
soul encountering soul
and tongues of fire
it's 3:23 in the morning
and I can't sleep
because my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the earth was unraveling?
I want just this consciousness reached
by people in range of secret frequencies
contained in my speech
drew dellinger
The poem reminds me of the profound work done by environmental practitioner and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy. Her deep ecological workshops ask similar questions to Dellinger's. Towards the end of the workshop, participants sit in two circles facing each other and are asked to be in the future. The outside circle plays the role of the Future Elders; in the inner circle, the young people of the future ask the Elders - What did you do when you knew the earth was unravelling, when the planet was threatened, when the oceans lost species, when the forests were felled, when the rivers ran dry - what did you do?
