This poem and it’s attribution was posted on my local NextDoor Neighborhood website.
I’m dancing.
Dancing my grief, my rage, my helplessness.
Needing to move my body and move the energy so that the fight and flight response can dissolve into tears and I can soften again.
Each.
Impossibly.
Tense.
Muscle.
I’m dancing in my prison of privilege.
The roof and floor that I call home.
The nest – now burning, or burnt, or lost for so, so many.
I’m dancing the realisation of Covid Hell for those literally trapped inside – when sheltering in place for me was doubling the size of my veggie garden.
And becoming a fledgling bee keeper.
You were trapped and I was free.
Now.
I.
Feel.
You.
I’m dancing the prison industrial complex.
It’s the first time it’s come to show itself to me.
It’s landed in me. It’s inside me. And I’m screaming.
How do you trap a soul in a cell with no window and expect it to heal? Unless eternal damnation was the plan all along? Unless compassion is a concept on paper but theory for humanity.
I am them.
I am the prison walls reflecting impotence, trappedness, inconsequence at a time when our world needs everything they are.
I am the helplessness. The agony turned inwards. The betrayal of a system.
In.
Every.
Way.
I am the wailing and the ears too deaf to listen.
Only I’m listening.
I dance the burning of the camp in Lesbos. The misery, the rage, the horror. The homelessness. Again. The unwantedness. The no place to go.
I am that. It’s here inside me for all to see.
These fires that are burning here – but warming your world there….they are screaming injustice. Separation. Dominance. Separation. Thoughtlessness. Separation. Carelessness. Separation. Apathy. Separation. Ignorance. Loss.
Unthinkable loss.
SEE ME life cries – from every prison cell, every trafficked child, every factory farm, every slaughtered forest, poisoned ocean, damned river…
Our world is screaming for us to wake up to the sacred pact we ARE in this life. The pact to recognize the sacredness of ALL.
ALL.
There is no ‘them’.
There is no ‘over there’.
It’s.
All.
Here.
I dance to tear down the walls within me that have kept out the horrendous suffering of others – for there are no others – and THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.
I dance while impossible smoke holds me prisoner so that I might feel how billions live daily, in levels of pollution that we leave them to endure.
These fires have ripped open my felt experience of social injustice in ways I could never have imagined. On. So. Many. Levels.
I am burning