Have you walked into the empty graveyard on division street?

Have you walked into the

Empty graveyard

On division

Street?

Molly Nagin

Caterpillar and John Deere weapons of massacre

Have pilfered densely populated homeland

And will cover up

the evidence of the genocide

With our asphalt-laden excuses

To drive a car

to go to church.

 

But the forest is our church,

dear olympia unitarian universalist congregation,

You seem to have forgotten

the truth of your devotion,

The messages in the ocean,

Because we do not need

more boxes of classrooms

for kids to file into and out of

when this infinite moment

is our lesson plan

and the biodiverse planet

is our sources;

And the irony breaks my heart

That you would bulldoze the forest

In the name of our children’s future.

 

It’s a sacred experience

Becoming indigenous human walking amongst the plants

Have you forgotten your sensual and inherited purpose?

 

I have spent what feels like lifetimes

Staring into the empty graveyard

On division street.

And it invigorates primordial rage and grief within me

To watch god-loving social justice-fighting folk stand for homicide

And shrug the knowing that we’re here to protect and keep healthy

the Earth who

is

us

all, bottom line, that is our contract,

we get to be human as long as we respect that we are way more than that.

So please, everybody,

Take a breath with me.

Feel the tension

Of expanding a parking lot

For increased congregation

By sacrificing a wildland

When all living creatures are facing

Ecological disease.

 

Please every body

take a breath with me

And feel the tension

Of instigating the pogrom of the forests

In an effort to provide a future for our children

Whose children may not be able to breathe

Let alone receive a quality education.

 

I hear that it took three years to make this decision,

That it took many conversations.

So I know that you tried to do the best thing,

that at least you didn’t eradicate the wetland,

But whenever I walk along division

I may forever remember that the forest once lived here

And the crows and the bees and the ferns and the cedar trees

And the owls and the mushrooms and the worms and all the creatures

Once thrived here

And where did they go?

Where did they go?

You hired Caterpillar to dispose of the bodies

And maybe they are going to build more condos

On Mudbay Road.

 

I ask that you acknowledge your mistake

And pay some respect to our home.