The Ones Who Could Not Stay Still

For Earth Day

The tiger is caged or dead, and the oxen bred to plod endlessly before the plow.
We do it because we can.
— David Johns

We lived with the land, not on top of it.
We moved with the seasons—with salmon, with elk, with butterflies.
We knew when the camas bloomed,
when the salmonberry was ripe.
We knew the call of the nighthawk in summer.
We knew how to wait.
To gather what was ready and leave what was not.
To take only enough, because the land was not ours.
The land fed us because we listened.
We are the wild ones who belong to the land.

But then they came…
the ones who could not stay still.
And they call us property.
They call us pests.
They call us resources.

First they slaughtered the big ones,
the giant sloths, the mastodons, the woolly mammoths.
Then they slaughtered
the buffalo, the antelope, the wolves.
Then they plucked the last song from the trees and
plowed soil into dust, dust into wheat.
They built a prison fence around the land—
not to keep the wild ones in, but to keep us out.

It’s progress, they said.
We feed cities, they said.
We feed civilization, they said.
The more they fed, the more they had to feed.

The land bled. It blew away in the wind.
So they took more.
And more.
And more.

They tell us we don’t belong in their world.
Because we don’t try to master the Earth.
Because we don’t build monuments to ourselves.
Because we know the Law of Life, not the names of kings.

They put pictures of us on their (prison) walls, and then look away while they cut us here, there, and everywhere.

They ate from the tree of knowledge but
it is we who remember what they forgot.

That you cannot eat metal.
That you cannot drink oil.
That you cannot conquer the soil forever.
That the land is not a thing—she is a mother.

I watch the fields now, from the edge of what remains.
I see the rows stretch in silence, devoid of beesong, birdsong, and joy.
Land split open by concrete and asphalt, still bleeding from her wounds.
How many ears of corn does it take
to replace a meadowlark?
How much plastic
to restore a newt?

They taught themselves how to feed a million mouths
but forgot how to listen to a single tree.

And still they come.
Expanding. Enclosing.
Never asking, only taking.
Never hearing the voices that say: Stop. Return. Remember.

We remember.
The land remembers.

And somewhere, beneath the asphalt and the asphalt-thought,
the wild waits.

Still breathing.
Still possible.

Our stomachs are full, but we are hollow in our souls.
— David Johns