night gift

make space and let the night speak through you—what will the darkness say?

will it sigh the song of night-cleaners, the lament of the wrongly imprisoned, the rage of the ragged, the dispossessed? how will the night take you back? will you be the vessel for earth shatter, hydro poison, ancestral revenge? perhaps steady weeds, growing irrepressibly into the cracks, urban repurposing, straddling both the drugs that kill & the ones that heal? the globe moves around the sun, unstoppable, feeding pine trees & the petro-state alike, giving us the days and nights by which to stand with the trees, what the oil industry calls overburden, or to die more rapidly, more stupidly, by peak oil. as rivers & oceans fill with carcinogenic wastes from the petroleum-plastic supply chain, the political systems follow, stuffed full of suncorpse & tired old neocolonial ego that refuses to stop growing until it reaches the limits of the planet’s patience. who knows what alliances & monkey wrenches will be enough to stop the greed of the greasy machine? what i do know is the humble migrants who’ve travelled the ocean have felt its wisdom more deeply than an arrogant elite that doesn’t heed the world’s necessary stories. jail the stories & the storytellers, but they will keep speaking the night, until empire expires, with or without the multitudes alive. in this race may we be ready to move fast, yet steady enough to encompass musicians & lake gatherings, forests & guerrilla gardens, fuelled by a love more immense than the injustices we’ve inherited. we need to live the world that is possible even while we struggle through war. respect living coasts & fluid watersheds, not murderous imperial borders. in grief & in celebration, in fear & in courage, in anger & in compassion, the night replenishes us so that we may continue to embody her songs.