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Pelican Poem Deena Metzger, poet, visionary, & medicine woman, writes of brown pelicans, an organic farmer, and the profound link between the illnesses of man and the destruction of the environment. What follows is the poem I read at the American Academy for Environmental Medicine. The subject of the poem owns an organic farm next to the breeding places of the brown pelicans and down wind of the pesticide sprays that undoubtedly did in the pelicans and the man as well. The poem does not state it explicitly, but after being tested negatively for a recurrence of cancer, it was discovered that this friend-farmer-environmentalist is suffering from a disintegrating bone condition that is the same as that pelicans suffer from exposure to pesticides. His wife, also an environmentalist, noticed that the beautiful purple flower in the large photograph in the oncologist’s waiting room, is purple loose strife, an introduced plant, with a tenacious root system that chokes out other species, creating biologically unproductive monocultures that attract bees and butterflies to their blossoms, but offer no sustenance to higher life-forms.
Pelicans in the Midwest (prose poem”) The chicks died. Eight thousands of them. And you almost died too. And then it was revealed that you may be breaking the way so many fragile eggs broke, vulnerable as the bird nation to the poisons that erode the essential structures of our lives.
It is not enough to grieve, but to know the grief, its cause, its devastation, its imponderable effects upon everything it touches. We make a poison and cannot control its spread. It is a power with a mind of its own, it wants to be itself, and everything it touches dies, quickly in some cases, or over long, long stretches of time, a human lifetime, or longer, we do not know. And those, like yourself, who never made the poison, who stand against it, who cast a sacred circle to protect what is inside, who become the trees against an ill wind, still succumb. We can’t protect the circle and the wind wasn’t asked where to carry the powder. It wasn’t asked where to set it down, or how to free itself from what it would never take up on its own.
What is the choice? To take the grief into ourselves, or to take the poison into ourselves, or both, on this terrible path we are asked to carve toward a different kind of knowledge than the kind we have been taught to gather to us and to call power. Knowledge is power, we were told.
This is not power. Look how the white powder has made a powder of our bones. Look how the egg dissolves at the slightest tremor. Look how it cannot protect or sustain what it loves.
I try to write this and I have only music to offer. A certain music in the rhythm or the arrangement of words alongside each other so that they become companions to a vision too far away to see. We do not know and it depends entirely on us. And then the song I never knew before takes me and I hear the words I wouldn’t know to speak:
The challenge is to become the pelican though we have never entered the territory of Pelican mind. Grief is the shimmering cry that can bind us to each other so exactly that there will be no distinction between one thought, one being, and another, the way the pelicans glide together upon the lower breezes and currents in graceful lines that simultaneously display their acquiescence and their intent.
Like the pelican we look down at our chicks and watch them die. We observe helplessly – that is our calling. If we pretend for a moment that there is something we can do, we will have lost contact with Pelican mind. Making this connection, difficult as it may seem, is what we can do. So then let us observe hopelessly as they must do. You – I – we must do this. We must be helpless for a long time and then, afterwards, when we pick up our lives, we will not pick up anything at all that will do harm. We will not weigh one harm against another, or one creature or one species. We will not choose the immediate over the long run or this moment over the future. We will not choose the lesser of two evils; we will not be expedient or resigned. We will not.
Such a garment of sorrow you are asked to wear. Such a delicate silk woven from your own body, your own tears, from a storm of feathers. A strange raiment that will never be a fashion. Yet, clad this way, you will not do everything for these little ones, our beloveds, your chicks, your babes, now flesh of your flesh. Yes your babes, their little lives, your little ones, your own body, your little life, all our little lives.
from: "GRIEF AND VISION AT THE THRESHOLD OF THE UNKNOWABLE: A COUNCIL "
by DEENA METZGER, April 22, 2006 Earth Day
****************** Related blog: Brown Pelicans Make Comeback http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=309&i=235
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