Poetry

Syllables for the planet

Plastics

Plastics in your mouth again, plastics in the web of life; as long as it is legal to make the planet inhabitable, legal to destroy the future of our children, no sustainability goals will be achieved.

Solidarity

What? Solidarity that transcends the barriers between urban and rural areas, moves beyond local and regional scales, includes other species, and contributes to an equal and sustainable society.

Scales

Yes, we bring society back to the human scale, away from the alienating anonymity of multiple-lane highways and global supply chains, away from military bases and financial centers.

Nowhere

The lawns are burning, the houses are burning, and the asphalt roads are melting; nowhere to hide, nowhere to go; a crow is singing intensively; an unsustainable society is disappearing before our eyes.

Power

Stop the war; stop the genocide; no to military-industrial complexes. For sure, global peace will not come easy, but it will never come if we continue to enable the centralization of power.

Boats

Big men and their big ships: these ships are not made for system change; these ships are military means, not obsolete artifacts of a demilitarized world. The ocean is on fire, the men are drinking, and the ships are drifting.

Everywhere

Plastics in the air we breathe; plastics in the water quenching our thirst; plastics in the food we eat; waste of a society praising capitalist production in the blood; we swim in the ocean, seeing nothing but waste.

Fire

When the forests are burning, the glaciers are melting, and the “global leadership” is “restructuring”, it is time to reclaim power, time to stop the arsonists, and time to make sustainability a reality.

Soil

Soil contamination and soil sealing, your daily experiences; past and present mistreatment, your future in the making; forgotten, raped, tortured, treated like waste; only a soil revolution worth its name to join.

Water

What is happening? Where am I heading? It is still war; snowflakes are falling, touching my skin, covering my hair, keeping me awake. Water in motion, rising, falling, flowing, circulating, changing form, giving me hope.

Lies

Still alive? End the irrationality, end the doublespeak, liberate the words. If fascism starts with monoculture and repeated lies, anti-fascism must be about growing wildflowers and about telling the truth.

Means

Alienation in supermarkets: things that distract; things that disrupt; tiny things that destroy; undemocratic means of production, means of consumption, means of computation; made in an addicted society.

Strangers

We are strangers in a strange place; zeros and ones that distract us, keep us all awake; trackers that follow our movements wherever we go; digital assets of private companies; advertising that reveals what we are.

Violence

If violence and threats of violence define our way of life, reproducing structural inequality, anti-violence must be about uprooting every attempt to silence, every attempt to normalize.

Wealth

Representative plutocracy: lying, hiding, deceiving, harassing, mismanaging, openly supporting white supremacy. Indeed, they are very rich men and do what they please; yesterday, they left the planet.

Clay

How to liberate ourselves? We liberate ourselves by preserving life on this planet; we liberate ourselves by stopping the killing; open the cages, open the dams; end the cruelty, end the war; revive, revive.

Leaves

Still falling, covering the ground; already organic matter, already digested by worms; teaching us to love, keeping us alive; this is an emergency call; this is a call for planetary revolution.

Chains

Global supply chains, global value chains; chains of lifelong exploitation, chains of systemic destruction; ending violence, ending racism, ending oppression; webs of full-blown liberation; Starting a revolution.

Holes

Coal, oil, tar sands, fossil gas, fracking, deep-water drilling, open-pit mining, unconventional ways of raping the rocks; deforestation, water contamination, ecological devastation; stop killing us.

Pandemic

Shifting goals, shifting strategy; restoring revolutionary responsibility; energy from below, from living systems, from the sun; what had to be done, was finally clear; moving beyond normality.

Virus

Capitalist food production and a new virus; shrinking habitats and a human host; upside down, inside out; locking down and holding out; death and suffering; profit and inequality; business as usual.

Cars

Impervious surfaces, pollution, destroyed habitats; death systems, death systems, death systems abound; irreversible moves till life ends; gone are the mutual relations of cohabitants; gone are the flowers now.

Decades

Now we know that we must heal the ecological rifts, that we depend on you; time for rebellion and time for struggle, high time for revolution; in solidarity with you, a planet somewhere in this galaxy.