Photo: ridhamuslim.blogspot.com

We Speak for the 70 Percent
by Susu Jeffrey
 
We speak for the 70-percent.
Our bodies
are 70 percent water.
The surface of the earth
is 70 percent water.
We are the water people
on the water planet.
 
If you could wring out a rock
you’d get water.
Water is the first medicine.
Every religion has water rituals
from newborn to death
we wash our relatives with love
and water.
 
Who will speak for the water?
We’re looking for it
out in space.
We’re dumping in it
Then we drink it.
Water carries life
and cholera.
 
In my state
every drop of water
is contaminated with the herbicide
atrazine. We live in an ocean
of corn. The humidity
is up. The moose population
is down. Minnesota’s poster person
for climate change
is a disappearing moose.
 
In my state we have floods
and forest fires—simultaneously.
We are cooking the air
into a frenzy of tornadoes
and drought.
The Mississippi is too low
for shipping
and male catfish
have eggs in their testes.
 
In my state the headwaters
of the Mississippi, the Great Lakes
and Hudson Bay are threatened
by a tar sands pipeline
increase—for export.
The most expensive oil
in…the world.
 
We speak for the 70 percent.
Tar sands pipes carry 60 percent
gummy oil
40 percent chemicals
separated and piped back.
Doubles the chance
of spills.
More volume than the Keystone XL
we are the Land of 10,000 Leaks.
I don’t want to drink
your fracking chemicals.
 
Fracking—
the new F-bomb.
Every war
is a war against the earth.
Pachamama doesn’t need people.
 
Water is
the great sculptor
of the earth.
You can read
the history of the earth
in the valleys of the mountains,
in the ice cores
and hear it in the song of the springs
and the thunder of a calving glacier.
 
We drink dinosaur piss.
Part of my 70 percent water
harks back 65 million years.
Dinos got littler.
Evolved into birds—
or died out. Remember?…
The future.
 
Think like water
governed by heat
and gravity—
the heat is snowballing.
The weather pattern
is a yo-yo.
Insurance rates
are up, and up.
 
Masaru Emoto saw
the water prayer
in frozen, crystal messages.
Ojibwe women sing it
in Ojibwe.
Water we love you.
Water we respect you.
Water we thank you.
Water, please forgive us.

 
No copyright 2013.

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