Only loving the world makes sense now.
Only a wild aching surrender.

The fight was love,
The only kind I knew.
How do I just let this earth die?

Each moment of breaking open:
The shattering that was the homecoming
Made possible by a single sunrise swallowing me whole
Or the arroyo demanding prostration
And returning my belonging.
And a million moments more
Where earth,
For a little while,
Reminded me
who
I
am.

There’s no turning back
Once you’ve been claimed;
No blinking away the tears
That rightfully drench each awake moment.
The chortle of the red wing blackbird
Remakes my world each spring,
And the rippling moonrise in December
Presses holy silence into my bones.

Watching ice constellate along the banks of the river
And recede the next day,
Snow skiffs announcing winter,
Contradicted by the new December heatwave
The bear who should be hibernating,
Encouraged back out by a balmy interlude,
And the hummingbirds who don’t know which way to fly…

How don’t you fight against what we’ve done?
I’ve asked myself a thousand times.
And I’ve fought, carrying my suffering struggle
Of killing what I love
Like a rare treasure,
As testament of my love
As bounty for the believers
As spear for the sleepers
As prayer to a wholeness that visits
Sometimes.

Fighting made sense once.
Now it doesn’t.
What I’ve learned
What I’m remembering
is this:
I didn’t do it. Neither did you. Neither did they.
And so did we all.
And here we are.

Each blueberry we eat picked by slaves,
The shiny computer filled with Gaian innards,
The frozen grief breaking our bodies
into splintered mindhells,
The fissures of any likely future –
There’s only a single assenting answer
To each and every grievance.

The way to life is the way to death.
Wasn’t it always?

Kristopher Drummond is an earth-rooted coach, writer and photographer living near Yellowstone National Park in the US. His work offers an invitation into falling deeper in love with the wild world while also aiming to decompose colonial narratives.

www.kristopherdrummond.com
Instagram: @kd_words
Image © Kristopher Drummond 2020