by Margaret Randall

We measure and name our era
Holocene, drawing a line
beginning 11,700 years in the past
when that terrifying ice melted.
We call its surviving humans primitive,
imagine grunts, fire as prize, raw meat
and chance discoveries.

The experts stoke religious denial,
biblical time and progress
as superiority, describe a people
without history or written language
to bequeath us a narrative
of barely intelligent life, not a Shakespeare
or Mozart among them.

Atop Fajada Butte at the ceremony
that is Chaco Canyon,
we watch the dagger of light
split in perfect halves that spiral
carved on rock, note how each
Great House is aligned with a planet
and begin to unravel the lie.

Then we learn it’s not only Chaco
but ancient sites across the globe
stone circles and mounds of earth
giving lie to our supremacy.
Ego of race and gender preceded by
that great ego of civilized man: a weight
we nurture shamelessly.

Studies not born of a single life
spent chasing the big prize
but centuries of observation.
Calendars that challenge the accuracy
of atomic time. Earth, sky,
and the human body stitched together
in a poetry of waiting.

Our progress is plastic and cement
clogging oceans, debris of all sorts
cluttering space. We turn our backs
on the energy of sun and wind
rape the earth of its most vulnerable bounty,
invade and kill to stockpile a future
destroyed before it arrives.

Our academy praises such sophistication,
reaps billions in profit, while
the 300,000 inhabitants of tiny Vanuatu
ask if anyone cares their nation
is disappearing beneath a rising sea
in a future too close for comfort
or solution.

We were here, those ancestral voices
tell us, but you didn’t listen,
couldn’t hear our stories,
honor our knowledge or the rhythm
of a wisdom that doesn’t fit
this conviction you sustain
with your entitlement.

by Charlotte H. Matthews

When hay in the loft spontaneously caught fire,
we blindfolded the horses and led them out
of the burning barn. Tree peonies live for a hundred
years, outlive us. I once saw hundreds of people
gather at dusk to witness bats feeding under a trestle
bridge before disappearing over the wide water.
Freezing rain can glaze over apples at night. When
the air warms, the apples drop out the bottom,
leaving their icy ghosts behind. We all have two
pairs of floating ribs, 27 bones in our hands
and can save one another by just listening.

by Charlotte H. Matthews

What’s true is that someone
really did help my daughter
on an icy night in a parking lot
in the middle of nowhere. A stranger
asked if he could lend a hand.
And while she may have fleetingly
considered it, she did not look for
nail holes as together they strung
red jumper cables between
hoods of cars in the raw
February air, each knowing
some things are best left unsaid.

by Charlotte H. Matthews

Spent years on the sea carving
into whale bone what he saw and heard

and came to know: the swap of ropes
uncoiling on deck, water heaving itself

against the ship’s hull. After his knife
scrapes out what there are no words for,

he fixes lampblack to make the images
stand out, day after day hunkered

in the crew’s quarters during spells
of no wind and rough seas and thick fog,

so lost in the doing he is eight again,
back in his childhood orchard as

Holsteins graze under the pear tree and
September’s light sutures the day together.