Precious Lady, Red Alert from Planet Earth

Dear Precious Lady,
We need your light to shine on us right now.
We’ve got ourselves into some trouble here,
every footing we find is too slippery to stand.
We have dug-gone too far to stop it,
deep in the body of our blessed earth.
I know you can feel it in your own body.
Finally we know, if we didn’t before
that every single particle of love
and greed is connected to every single other part.
I know your Son told us that
but it seems we are slower learners than we think.
Do we know now who we are? Or not?
The balance of knowing and not knowing
keeps us held in the taut tangle of ignorance. Ours.
There is no place I find I want my finger to point.
Against another person place or thing.
There is no blame I find I want to place against anyone
but myself. While I am too busy making ends meet
others are meeting ends too sad for my feeble words.

Dear Precious Lady,
since I woke up with the spilling of oil and blood
in my heart. I didn’t know what else to do. But
write you. And do what my mama told me,
pray pray pray.
Some are calling for a miracle, a rescue mission
from on high. Some wait to die.
Like bird and fish who slick with sorrow
meet their ends right now and tomorrow.
Will you let us go on this way until we compost ourselves?
That which was given as the blood of the earth
we have used to run machines which could have
run on light. On light!
Now, no solution in sight. (how do we stop the tragedy?)
Oh, how we try to rescue our collective identity
from the thought of being born into a kind of
ignorant hell – the kind of hell where we
do not pay attention to things given freely from love
like air, food and water, which we now fear
and thus drink from plastic vessels instead of streams.
Through all of this madness, there is a thought I cannot shake.
Though in my heart I try to shake it loose.

That we behave badly because we do not think we are loved.
That we behave badly because we do not accept forgiveness.
That we behave badly because we do not know what we do.

But we are loved. And we can be forgiven when we receive it.
And, we do know what to do, I think we do, do we?

We act in love, and not in harm and in each way that we are that way,
it will always be the right way. Right? But what do I know?
Right now, children are crying, microsystems are dying
and marcrosystems are sighing, heaving, heavily. choking.
And the shores where we once we sipped lemonade
and played volleyball barefooted and skipped along
in white sand,
are closed. And not for renovations.

And still I think we have a chance at goodness.
All of us. Am I naive? Hopelessly optimistic? yes. yes.
But the alternative to believing in the power of human
goodness and transformation is not something I care to
experience.
Help us remember Lady. That we can choose good.
That we can choose to be a part of a divine connection
with all that is. (Can you get this memo to the front of the line?)
This morning, I gather myself up as a child under the soft folds of
your garment and peak out at the world in wonder.
But thankfully, it is early, and I have time to pull all my red threads
together and have one more cup of coffee
before women with paintbrushes in hand like magic wands
and poems to breathe
come knocking on my studio door for school.

Show us what to do.
Red Alert from Precious Earth.
Oh so precious Earth.

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