You sit on the porch
While the drops patter around you
Then accelerate into a torrential rush.
Internally you squeal with delight
Sometimes you listen to rain on the alight blue square, but
Here it is! The real thing. Touch that grass. Dance that rain.
You drive through the forests of the north, hinterlands
Everywhere scars on the home of the Anishinaabe
Piles of logs sawed from old growth forests
As you careen by, a glimpse of a woman out spraying roundup on her shrubbery
Vast warehouses and
A thousand hidden chicken farms
What would happen if everyone read Kimmerer?
How would relationship with the land change if we all studied tree physiology?
What if our eyes were wide-opened to the complexity and symbiosis of all the organisms?
You may say I'm a dreamer
Of our shared billion nucleotides and metabolism?
But I'm not the only one.
So outside the city,
The way your culture treats the Earth causes grief, longing for a people
Who have names for all the plants
Have an inkling of the microbes
Which make food growth possible
Harvest energy within your own gut
Will cure Gaia of the poisons we've leached
As they share genes
Liberally and promiscuously
Digesting the aftermath of the Wendigo.
But the rain, the rain.
After the downpour of a few days ago
The survivors grow voraciously
From the cracks in the concrete.
Like a sprout at a superfund site
Like a pack of genetically distinct dogs thriving at Chernobyl
Like a saguaro keeping on, keeping on at Alamogordo Bombing Range, Los Alamos.