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Andrea Gibson, performing in Longmont, CO.
About Button:
Button Poetry is committed to developing a coherent and effective system of production, distribution, promotion and fundraising for spoken word and performance poetry.
We seek to showcase the power and diversity of voices in our community. By encouraging and broadcasting the best and brightest performance poets of today, we hope to broaden poetry’s audience, to expand its reach and develop a greater level of cultural appreciation for the art form.
Transcript provided by YouTube (unedited)
0:00
(gentle music)
0:02
– In the fifth grade I won the science fair
0:05
with a project on climate change
0:07
that featured a paper-mache ozone layer
0:08
with a giant hole through which a paper-mache sun
0:11
burned the skin of a Barbie in a bikini on a lawn chair.
0:14
Glaciers melting like ice cubes in our lemonade.
0:17
It was 1987 ain the town that could have invented red hats,
0:22
but the school principal gave me a gold ribbon
0:25
and not a single bit of attitude
0:26
about my radical political stance because neither he,
0:29
nor I knew it was political.
0:32
Science had not yet been fully framed as leftist propaganda.
0:36
The president did not have a Twitter feed
0:39
starving the world of facts.
0:42
I spent that summer as I had every summer before
0:45
racing to the forest behind my house
0:47
down the path my father called the old logging road
0:50
to a meadow thick with raspberry bushes
0:53
whose thorns were my very first heroes,
0:55
because they did nothing with their life
0:57
but protect what was sweet.
0:59
Sundays I went to church, but struggled to call it prayer
1:03
if it, if it didn’t leave grass stains on my knees.
1:06
Couldn’t call it truth if it didn’t come with a dare
1:08
to crawl into the cave by the creek
1:10
and stay there until somebody counted all the way to 100.
1:15
As a kid I thought 100 was the biggest number there was.
1:19
My mother absolutely blew my mind the day she said 101.
1:25
100 and what?
1:28
Billionaires never grow out of
1:30
doing that same math with years,
1:32
can’t conceive of counting past their own lifespans.
1:35
Believe the world ends the day they do.
1:39
Why are the keys to our future in the hands of those
1:41
who have the longest commutes from their heads
1:43
to their hearts, whose greed is the smog that keeps us
1:47
from seeing our own nature
1:49
and the sweetness we are here to protect?
1:52
Do you know sometimes when gathering nectar,
1:55
bees fall asleep in flowers?
1:58
Do you know fish are so sensitive
2:00
snowflakes sound like fireworks when they land on the water?
2:03
Do you know sea otters hold hands when they sleep
2:06
so they don’t drift apart?
2:07
Do you know whales will follow their injured friends
2:11
to shore often taking their own lives
2:14
so to not let a loved one be alone when he dies?
2:17
None of this is poetry.
2:19
It’s just the earth being who she is in spite of us
2:22
stamping barcodes on the sea.
2:24
In spite of us acting like Edison invented daylight.
2:27
Dawn presses her blushing face to my window,
2:31
asks me if I know the records in my record collection
2:34
look like the insights of trees.
2:37
Yes I say.
2:38
There is nothing you have ever grown that isn’t music.
2:42
You were the bamboo in Coltrane’s saxophone reed,
2:45
the mulberries that fed the silkworms that made the slippers
2:48
for the ballet.
2:49
The pine that built the loom that wove the hemp
2:52
for Frida Kahlo’s canvas, the roses that died her paint,
2:57
hoping her brush could bleed for her body
2:59
who more than the earth has blood for us.
3:04
How do we not mold our hearts after the first spruce tree
3:07
who raised her hand and beg to be cut into piano keys
3:11
so the elephants could keep their tusks?
3:14
The earth is the right side of history,
3:17
is the canyon my friend ran to when no one else he knew
3:21
would echo has chosen named back to him is the wind
3:24
the wailed through 1956 Alabama
3:27
until the poplar trees carved themselves
3:29
into Dr. King’s pulpit,
3:31
is the volcano that pours the mercury into the thermometers
3:36
held under our tongues.
3:37
The earth takes our temperature,
3:40
tells us when we are too hot,
3:42
even after we’ve spent decades denying her fever.
3:46
Our hands held to her burning forehead.
3:48
We insist she is fine while wildfires turn redwoods
3:52
to toothpicks readying the teeth of the apocalypse.
3:55
She sends smoke singles all the way from California
4:00
to New York City.
4:01
Ash falls from the sky.
4:03
Do you know the mountains of California used to look like
4:06
they’ve been set on fire because they were so covered
4:09
in monarch butterflies?
4:11
Do you know monarch butterflies migrate 3000 miles
4:15
using only the fuel they stored as caterpillars
4:18
in the cocoon.
4:19
We need so much less than we take.
4:22
We have so much more than we give.
4:24
Squirrels plant thousands of trees every year
4:27
just from forgetting where they left their acorns.
4:30
If we aim to be just half as good
4:32
as one of the Earth’s mistakes,
4:34
we could turn so much around.
4:36
Our living would be seed.
4:38
The future would have roots.
4:40
We would cast nothing from the garden of itself
4:44
and we would make the thorns proud.
4:48
(gentle music)
—
This post was previously published on YouTube.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
Escape the Act Like a Man Box | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow |
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