Our Progress is Plastic and Cement

by Margaret Randall

We measure and name our era
Holocene, drawing a line
beginning 11,700 years in the past
when that terrifying ice melted.
We call its surviving humans primitive,
imagine grunts, fire as prize, raw meat
and chance discoveries.

The experts stoke religious denial,
biblical time and progress
as superiority, describe a people
without history or written language
to bequeath us a narrative
of barely intelligent life, not a Shakespeare
or Mozart among them.

Atop Fajada Butte at the ceremony
that is Chaco Canyon,
we watch the dagger of light
split in perfect halves that spiral
carved on rock, note how each
Great House is aligned with a planet
and begin to unravel the lie.

Then we learn it’s not only Chaco
but ancient sites across the globe
stone circles and mounds of earth
giving lie to our supremacy.
Ego of race and gender preceded by
that great ego of civilized man: a weight
we nurture shamelessly.

Studies not born of a single life
spent chasing the big prize
but centuries of observation.
Calendars that challenge the accuracy
of atomic time. Earth, sky,
and the human body stitched together
in a poetry of waiting.

Our progress is plastic and cement
clogging oceans, debris of all sorts
cluttering space. We turn our backs
on the energy of sun and wind
rape the earth of its most vulnerable bounty,
invade and kill to stockpile a future
destroyed before it arrives.

Our academy praises such sophistication,
reaps billions in profit, while
the 300,000 inhabitants of tiny Vanuatu
ask if anyone cares their nation
is disappearing beneath a rising sea
in a future too close for comfort
or solution.

We were here, those ancestral voices
tell us, but you didn’t listen,
couldn’t hear our stories,
honor our knowledge or the rhythm
of a wisdom that doesn’t fit
this conviction you sustain
with your entitlement.