An Inspired Activist Writes an Ode to the Tar Sands Blockaders

Dave Warren, former street musician/song writer, Smithsonian marine biologist  and coral reef guide- and long haul trucker- spent three days with the Tar Sand Blockaders out in Winnsboro,Tx., and was moved to write this ode after taking part in one of the actions supporting the tree sitters at "Middle Earth". He plans to rejoin them in the near future  and encourages everybody who resonates with this ode to participate in what ever way they can including registering for an ' "Action Camp"  themselves.

Ode To The Middle Earthians

For them it is the green blood of Mother Earth,

the xylem and the phloem,

running in their veins,

drawn from the tap root,

like capillary action,

anchored to the forest floor,

rising through the living cambium  into the  soaring crowns.



Their arboreal hooches adorned,

with a fluttering of leaves and  streamers catching light,

their banners unfurled,

back-lit with the rising sun,

illumined in the amber glow of evening's low slanting light,

their totem home alive and rooted to the forest floor,

which, like their xylem earth blood,

moves them to ascend from the tap root to the crowns,

This is the calling they hear,

the haunting plaintive cries they heed,

The Middle Earthians  feel  a  shimmering in their green blooded veins,

above the mangling din of full metal treads,

the buncher/fellers,

they hear and heed the cry of the low skimming loons at dusk,

the singing of the great humpback whales,

the howling of the wolf's saturnian cadence broken,

by the howlings of  Petroleum Man,

still they listen  for the songs of  indigenous rising  from the Boreal forest,

the funeral  dirges  from the Ganges  Delta villages,

above maelstrom of metallic dissonance- the  mangling claws and chain saws,

laying waste to  one of the sacrifice zones,

it is here  where Middle Earthians have come to stake their claim,

here, a fragile line drawn on the forest floor,

It is here they turn into the maw of Petroleum Man,

here they draw their line for all the rest of us who sleep under our various SOMA opiates,

in our intravenous stupors,

plied so readily by the inducements of Petroleum Man. 

In a great and sweeping tumult of material fury, 
,
into a wilderness fraught with things we have lost our way,

whirling  in a gyre of things, and more things,

and still more things  beyond surfeit,

then still more things.




Lost in the artifice of things,

we have dis-remembered the aboriginal wilderness,

from which we all are sprung,

borne away from the indigenous garden,

our innocent genesis defiled,

where once the xylem and the phloem bound us as  consanguineous  blood in the web of things..

the sacred pulse of life is now drowned in the endless cacophonies of objects and their ephemeral desires,

always fleeting away, never captured ...


And so, here is where  Middle Earthinas have come to turn into the storm of things,

a heartland place, a winsome name, Winnsboro.

here a quivering of autumn leaves grace their  "Green Wall," 

close to the hydraulic hissings , the claws of the buncher/fellers

here  a row of pine spars where banners are unfurled  proclaiming a defense of the earth, 

calling us all from our chosen stupors,

to join the mounting  chorus to  howl back a unison refrain at "Petroleum Man" and his

looming, Frankensteinian  shadow,
 
each of us to catch our own reflection cast on a soulless monolith of empire....

this, the fragile line we draw in our occupied selves,

as well as those who still do not see,

foregiving them their ignorance.


Middle Earthians will keep their sacred haunts in the crowns of trees,

each day their holding ground  more consecrated,

their enduring vigil blessed more dearly,  

solo from their perches on monopods....

~ but wait ~ 

listen, if you can....

listen to the silent aboriginal music of the xylem and the phloem,

shimmering low against the howling din of the buncher/fellers,

murmuring in the whispering crowns,

a piercing chanticleer of an air horn semaphore,

a clear warning for all far from this fragile line in the forest,

maybe, wheeling in the slowing gyre of deep remembrance,

we will hear the deep tap root song, 

long dis- remembered,

pianissimo first,

then rising to forte,

singing in the xylem, 

ringing in the phloem,

from the heart of Middle Earth,


~ Mother Earth calling us back home again~