by A.M. Davis
` I am neither the hummingbird nor the honey bee.
Forget the obvious pretty forget the product forget the thing you love
to love
I am the fly that you would die without
` that thing
that everything dies without that thing that was born to be in love with moving
DNA plant stuff that thing that everything needs to cook up life and carry on
so flowering plants can carry you on as you think I am a lesser version
of a butterfly you write poems about after you put on your white gloves
and go into your backyard and pick your purely bred
roses, red to put on your dining room table.
The answer to the question “Can people really be that stupid?” is always
“yes”
I read, and I laughed without real amusement at the end of earth as we’ve know it
so much muchness in the name of stupid and crop yields the answer is always yes
` to make a culture/system/structure
replace five thousand indigenous cultures yes
so why not replace ten thousand species of plants
with one guy with a comb-over and a gene spicing kit
so that we can insert their stead one species
of plant that someone said should be sweeter than candy last a year on a shelf
taste good as heroin as it gives us diabetes and cancer
but we can fix that declare a war on stuff we’re great that way
the answer is still always yes to wish a hearty goodbye to ten thousand generations
of stewards of Turtle Island with godless wild notions that every inch of the planet
is alive with wild love for us kill off the notion that to love to truly love enough
is to pronounce the word “sacred” and then make this earth truly so
just like that
and then let’s act like we like the idea so much we
want to be them without really being them after we have gotten quite weary of
our notions of whiteness we’ll call them noble or cool
once they are gone from earth or imprisoned or no longer in our neighborhood
let’s scramble to make it all better because all of a sudden
` the whole world smells funny
and the noon sky isn’t really supposed to look like that
newborn babies aren’t supposed to make us cry when we look at them
but we do look away when they are misshapen infected from our viruses
The answer
` is always yes.
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A. M. Davis was born and raised in Oakland, California. She is storyteller/poet, a speaker on behalf of the Earth. In 2007, she walked away from her job to devote her life to her creativity. Upon attending a silent meditation retreat, she found space of time in her racing mind, and discovered that she was not her thoughts. This led to daily meditation, retreats, and becoming part of the East Bay Meditation Center community. She recently discovered the Joanna Macy’s work, and the trajectory of her life finally made sense.
You can find more of her work at annmariedavis.com.