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My Poetry Corner January 2026 features the poem “Jaguar Song” from the twelfth poetry collection Into the Hush by Arthur Sze, Poet Laureate of the United States 2025-2026. He is the first Asian American to serve in this position. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection which explores humanity’s impact on Mother Nature together with glimpses of her untouched beauty.
Listen—in an Anchorage night, / a crunching resembling cars colliding, / and, as the incoming tide slaps, / you will never forget inlet ice breakup; black spruce branches are etched / against the sky; far from a city lined / with fast-food spots, bars, and pawnshops, […] you marvel at the green translucency / of leaves, the mystery of photosynthesis; / as grief and joy well up, you step / into the vernal sharpening of the day— / apricot trees are the first to bloom. (Poem “Spring View” p. 5).
Born in 1950 in New York City to Chinese immigrants, Sze is an award-winning poet with twelve books of poetry published, a translator of classical Chinese poetry, and editor. His journey to becoming a poet began in 1968 during his first semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was pursuing a career in the sciences. As he tells it during an interview in 2025 with Jim Natal for Marsh Hawk Press:
“I sat in a large calculus class and felt increasingly bored by the lecture. I remember flipping to the back of a spiral notebook, and I started writing phrases to a poem. I was excited at what came to me, and, before the end of class, I had a rough draft…”
To his parents’ dismay, at the end of his sophomore year in 1970, after taking an inspiring poetry workshop with Denise Levertov, he abandoned what they considered safe and professional careers: scientist, engineer, doctor, or investment banker. Though they viewed his choice of poetry as wild and risky, twenty-year-old Arthur transferred to the University of California at Berkeley where Levertov had just taught. His faculty advisor and mentor, Josephine Miles, created an individual major in poetry for him in which he studied poetry, Chinese language and literature classes, and started to translate Tang dynasty poetry in English.
In his poem “Letter to Tao Qian” (132-194), Sze writes to the Chinese government official and warlord of the Han dynasty (p. 42):
I wish to tell you but lose the words— / more than a millennium later, / on another continent, in another language, / I know adversity strengthened you. // Today we possess antibiotics, / cars, cell phones; scientists / use infrared scanners, check a wildfire / that has charred 341,735 acres. […] Today we have no spell // that lessens loss; a neighbor’s backhoe / beeps as it excavates a slope. / Sifting your words, I dig at this site / where pines scent after rain;…
When he graduated from UC Berkeley, the adventurous young poet wanted to go somewhere he had never been before. Following the suggestion of his mentor, he hitchhiked to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with only a backpack, his curiosity, and the name of her friend. With the friend’s suggestion, he applied and was accepted to the New Mexico Poetry-in-the-Schools program. For the next ten years (1973-1983) he worked all over the state: on Native American reservations, in Spanish-speaking communities, with incarcerated juvenile offenders, at the School for the Deaf, and in the Penitentiary.
The young poet’s immediate affinity with Native Americans led to a teaching position at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 1984, where he taught linguistics, playwriting, and English Composition. Five years later, he became the director of the creative writing program and professor emeritus of IAIA until his retirement in 2006. As director, he expanded the IAIA Associate of Arts degree into a four-year Bachelor of Fine Arts undergraduate degree program.
The wind stokes flames, / and they leap across / the fire line: to the north, // a jagged red-and-yellow / ridgeline crackles / with billowing clouds of smoke. // To the far north, a singer / stretches walrus bladder / and, completing a box drum, // starts to hum; he nods / as a song takes shape in his hands…. (Poem “Wildfire Season” p. 49)
After leaving IAIA, Sze served as Santa Fe’s first poet laureate from 2006 to 2008. His connection with New Mexico’s diverse landscape and its peoples has never waned. Today, he lives in Sante Fe with his wife and poet Carol Moldaw.
The featured poem “Jaguar Song” (p. 18) attracted my attention because the jaguar is Guyana’s national animal. As the apex predator in Guyana’s tropical rainforests, the jaguar is a symbol of majesty, mystery, and power. It also holds a prominent place in the cultures and belief systems of pre-Columbian, Mesoamerican societies who live in or near the tropical rainforests.
Sze uses the Japanese zuihitsu free flowing, prose poetic form to give voice to the jaguar. Except for opening and closing em dashes, there is no other form of punctuation. Sentences are separated by a uniform space or gap of silence, adding tension to the words between each gap. The jaguar admonishes humans, regarded as a less physically strong species, for destruction of the natural world.
—Just after you sign and envision building homes on this tract you smell me in the dark know that I move through this terrain at night though you only think of building and selling even now you believe you can borrow my spirit by wearing a mask of my face on your face look at me delve into your fears is your deepest fear to be hacked strangled or be strapped to an IV in a bed with no chance to die I can grasp a turtle and break its shell with one bite I can pounce on a deer and crush its skull and neck with my teeth you slash and burn in the jungle force the snakes and macaws to retreat you even burn your own species alive look into my eyes I am your mirror and transformer if you destroy my species I will shape-shift and hunt you in your dreams…
Humanity’s weapons, machines, and power structures give us a false sense of invincibility (and impunity)—until, one day, we are not.
…and now as you rummage for keys at your apartment doorstep I am a passing jogger about to pounce I am the creature who smells your darkest thoughts and as you turn the key in the lock day or night out of the darkness I spring—
To read the complete featured poem “Jaguar Song” and learn more about the work of Asian American Poet Laureate Arthur Sze, go to my Poetry Corner January 2026.
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Published by The New Press, New York, USA, 2022
During the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, Dahr Jamail – an American award-winning journalist and environmental advocate – and Stan Rushworth – an elder and retired teacher of Cherokee descent living in Northern California – interviewed several people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic. Their featured collection of interviews offers us a wide variety of perspectives on a much more integrated relationship to Earth and all human and non-human beings.
Turtle Island is a term used by some Indigenous peoples, primarily those in North America, to refer to the continent. This name stems from various Indigenous creation stories which describe the landmass as being formed on the back of a giant turtle. The concept of Turtle Island is deeply significant in many Native American cultures as it reflects their spiritual beliefs and relationship with Mother earth.
As inhabitants of these lands for thousands of generations before the arrival of European conquistadores and colonizers, Native Americans carry in their ancestral memories the rise and fall of great civilizations before ours. They have much to teach us about surviving collapse and healing our broken relationship with Mother Earth.
While ExxonMobil led the charge and narrative in denying global warming by the burning of fossil fuels, Indigenous leaders alerted political leaders of this new threat to Mother Earth. The following quotations are taken from the chapter “Early Warnings” in the featured book We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth (USA, 2022, pp. xi-xxi).
In 1976, perturbed by the continued destruction on Mother Earth, threatening humanity’s existence, Hopi Elder Thomas Banyacya (1909-1999) addressed the United Nations Habitat Forum in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada:
The time has come to join in meaningful action. Destruction of all land and life is taking place and accelerating at a rapid pace. Our Native land is continuing to be torn apart and raped of its sacredness by the corporate powers of this nation…. We do have an alternative to this. Mankind has a chance to change the direction of this movement, do a roundabout turn, and move in the direction of peace, harmony, and respect for land and life. The time is right now. Later will be too late.
In 1977, Muskogee-Creek Elder Phillip Deere (1929-1985) went to the United Nations in Geneva to deliver his message about the right relationship towards Mother Earth and the consequences of violating that relationship. In his 1978 speech, called “An Understood Law,” he said that the lack of respect for the natural world and its peoples could not work, either for itself, its constituents, or its habitats.
I see, in the future, perhaps this civilization is coming near to the end. For that reason, we have continued with the instructions of our ancestors…. This society is confused. I can see that as a bystander…. A confused society cannot exist forever. The first people who came here were lost. They are still yet lost!
In 1982, Mohawk Chief Jake Swamp-Tekaronianeken (1940-2010) founded the Tree of Peace Society, choosing the white pine tree as a symbol of the Haudenosaunee people. His message was one of healing. He often spoke of the grief carried by almost all people of the First Nations here and worldwide, a grief born in all the destruction that has ensued and their separation from each other and the natural world.
In 1990, the Kogi people of highland Colombia reached out to the BBC to produce a documentary film to share with the world, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers’ Warning. Their vision of the adverse effects of colonization made them break self-imposed isolation long enough to sound their warning.
The Great Mother created the world in water. She makes the future in it. This is how she speaks to us. We look after Nature. We are the mamas [seers/leaders of the community] and do this here. And we mamas see that you are killing it by what you do. We can no longer repair the world. You must. You are uprooting the Earth. And we are divining to discover how to teach you to stop.
We Are the Middle of Forever places Indigenous voices at the center of conversations about today’s environmental crisis. The twenty interviews in this collection are presented in the order of their occurrence, not by theme: strength, a sense of permanence, living from the heart, awareness, trust, and more. In the coming months, I will feature the insights and ancestral wisdom shared by each participant for consideration.
On January 7, 2026, our current leadership issued a Presidential Memorandum withdrawing the United States from sixty-six international organizations, conventions, and treaties that are contrary to the interests of our nation. All organizations dealing with climate change, the environment, and related issues are on the list:
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
- Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
- International Renewable Energy Agency
- UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries
- UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UFCCC).
When you sell your soul to Big Oil, you’ve got to deliver.
Faced with yet another setback in global collaboration and cooperation, we the People of Earth cannot afford to flounder. Our children, grandchildren, and future generations are counting on us to repair our abusive and broken relationship with Mother Earth. As the Kogi people repeatedly admonished in their 1990 documentary film:
Think, think, think of the Great Mother. At night before you sleep…think what you’re going to do the next day. What things need to be done and how you’re going to do them. Think it through.
Source Credit – Wikipedia
I’m still trying to process everything that has happened since the Earthrise on January 20, 2025. The punches were fast, violent, and relentless. They upended the global order established at the end of World War II. European allies have been left out in the cold to face what was once our mutual Cold War adversary. North American allies are treated with contempt. Venezuela’s coveted vast oil reserves have transformed the Caribbean Sea into a danger zone. How did we get here?
Sorry Greenland. The sovereignty of nations be damned. Your rare-earth metals are essential to our technological advancement. Our Big Tech giants are in a race to colonize Mars and the vast expanse of space beyond. They need these metals to build and power their AI machines. They also need lots of energy (and water) to operate their vast AI data centers.
In a frenzy to reduce our national debt (or so he claimed), the richest man on Earth slashed the little good that we did across the world: providing food for the hungry, medicines for the sick, and shelter for the displaced. He cared not about wounding our collective human spirit as members of Mother Earth’s global family. He considered not that the pain we inflict on people beyond our borders make us less secure. Having the greatest military force matters not when survival depends upon compassion, cooperation, and collaboration. Just ask communities devastated by severe weather disasters.
In the name of government efficiency, the slasher did not spare our federal workers. Thousands were fired, forced to resign, or left in limbo. Affliction has spread across our towns and cities. Living in an alternate reality where all is good, far removed from real-life conditions of the general population, the Scrooges and Grinches think nothing of depriving families of a decent life. Worse still for the little ones.
As promised, our black and brown immigrant communities are under attack as masked, armed men grab alleged criminal illegal immigrants in public spaces and workplaces. Raids in the parking lots of Home Depot outlets, America’s largest home improvement retailer, have put my son at risk. An independent contractor, he’s a regular customer at our local outlet for materials and equipment.
My sons see no cause for concern: They’re not illegal immigrants. It’s disheartening that they refuse to consider evidence that no brown-skin immigrant is safe. I avoid high-risk areas and remain alert when out in public spaces.
As a writer with a public online website and blog, I face other challenges. How do I address the issues close to my heart with the censorship of certain words and the criminalization of certain ideologies? How can I avoid having my articles deleted or made invisible by algorithms sweeping our virtual spaces? In this New Year, I must find new ways of telling stories of our human predicament. After all, I am a storyteller.
Bearing witness to our self-inflicted wounds as a nation hurts my heart and soul. How does labeling millions of Americans as domestic terrorists make us great? How does punishing the State of California, our nation’s largest economy, help to make us great? How does criminalizing our low-wage immigrant workforce, legal or illegal, upon which our economy depends, make us great? How do we become great when we stifle the potential and talents of the marginalized across our nation?
While we blame, hate, and fight each other, the world we humans created since the industrial revolution is collapsing around us. The AI revolution underway will not save us from ourselves. We are in urgent need of new ways of thinking, being, and doing.
As Mother Earth rises to a New Year, may we rise up out of the darkness of exclusion, greed, and hate into the light of compassion, generosity, and solidarity. Above all, may we awaken to a new appreciation of our shared home that gives us life. We can no longer take her gifts for granted.
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Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press (UK)
My Poetry Corner November 2025 features the poem “The Day of Revolution” from the poetry collection My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982) by Guyanese poet and teacher Mahadai Das; included in the posthumous publication of her work (1976-1994) A Leaf in His Ears: Collected Poems by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2010). All excerpts of her poems are taken from the Peepal 2010 publication.
Born in 1954 in Eccles on the East Bank Demerara, Guyana, Mahadai’s father was a rice farmer. She attended the prestigious Bishops High School for girls in the capital, Georgetown, where she began writing poetry. Then in 1971, her mother died while giving birth to her tenth child, leaving Mahadai, then seventeen, with responsibility for her siblings. Later that year (November), she was crowned as the “Miss Diwali” beauty-queen. What a boost that must’ve been for the adolescent Mahadai!
In the early 1970s, while taking care of her siblings, Das earned her BA at the University of Guyana and became a volunteer member of the Guyana National Service.
Disillusioned with the corruption and authoritarianism of Burnham’s regime (1974-1985), she became involved with the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), co-founded by Walter Rodney (1942-1980), an African historian and political activist. In the poem “Militant” from her debut poetry collection I Want to be a Poetess of My People (1977), Das declares her commitment to joining the fight for change in Guyana (pp. 39-40):
Militant I am / Militantly I strive. / I want to march in my revolution, / I want to march with my brothers and sisters. / Revolution firing my song of freedom. / I want my blood to churn / Change! Change! Change!… // Child of the revolution! I want to grow… grow… grow! / I want to grow for my revolution. / I want to march for my country!
In her quest to grow professionally to better serve her country, Das left Guyana to obtain her MA at Columbia University, New York. After earning her MA, she began a doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, Illinois. While there, she became critically ill and never completed the program.
Das was living in the USA when Walter Rodney was assassinated on June 13, 1980. She laments and mourns his loss in the poem “For Walter Rodney & Other Victims,” published in her second collection My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982, pp. 54-55):
Tears fall / where I sit. / All the leaves of the trees are falling away: / naked stems stand alone; charred, / strung-out limbs / seeking to span the bitter wind that comes.
The revolution of the people died that day. Resistance to the authoritarian regime became even more dangerous. Though she felt safe from attack in the USA, Das avoided overt criticism of the regime in her 1982 poetry collection. Denise de Caires Narain Gurnah notes in the Introduction (pp. 15-16): “Exuberant “vision” is replaced by a guarded watchfulness and the poems become knotty, secretive and introspective with no clear sense of who is being addressed.”
The poetic persona in the title poem “My Finer Steel Will Grow” laments (p. 49): There is no place to rest / my accidental head. / It is a dog’s life. Today there are no bones…. Yet, hope lives that the day will come when the sun / will shine its brazen face / upon my heart, gone dark / like night and rotted blood…. / Whilst the hammering arm / in rhythmic falter flags, / my finer steel will grow. / My heaven. Such is the nature of resilience.
The poem “My Final Gift to Life” gives voice to the suffering of the people and lives already cut down by his rotting sceptre beaded / with murder in their struggle for freedom from tyranny. The murderous oppressor is not named (p. 53):
The night is pierced by strange cries of woe, / but he who stirs their tears / in the cauldron on his vanity, / preparing for a feast and a night of loud song, / little knows he of we who / sharpen our spears in night’s / naked hours. / Death be my final gift to life.
The Civil Rebellion of 1979-1980 ended prematurely with the assassination of the revolutionary opposition leader. In the featured poem “The Day of Revolution,” the poetic persona dreams of a renewed mass uprising against the authoritarian regime (p. 61):
I dreamt that the day of revolution would come;
that thousands would storm the city streets
screaming for justice.
Who can hold back the climbing sun in the sky?
Children hate the trapped darkness of the night.
Soon the crowd advanced and raised
a further cry.
Students skip classes to join their parents in the streets. Soldiers, ordered to hold back the protestors storming the presidential palace, refuse to turn their weapons on children. Instead, they came / bearing in the stems of their guns, flowers / for the children of freedom’s / new regiment.
The counterfeit general, left wingless
in the hostile air, clothed in the tarnished
brooches of his vanity, unprepared
for the sudden speech of freedom,
continued to spin his illusions
with the rotten yarn of his life.
Last night
I dreamed that the day of revolution would come.
The revolution did not come as Das had dreamed. On August 6, 1985, the 62-year-old counterfeit general died of heart failure during a throat surgery. Years later, the Peaceful Revolution in the Soviet Eastern Bloc brought down the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, eventually leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on December 31, 1991. It’s no coincidence that Guyana’s authoritarian regime ended with free and fair elections in October 1992.
We the people of Earth are all connected through time and space.
Over the last decade of Das’ life, debilitating health problems curtailed her writing career. In April 2003, while in Barbados for medical treatment, she died of a heart attack. She was 49 years old.
To read the complete featured poem “The Day of Revolution” by Guyanese poet Mahadai Das, go to my Poetry Corner November 2025.
Photo Credit: Hachette Book Group
[Tech billionaires] will keep looking for ways to extend their control over the world unless they are curtailed. Their dreams are dreams of endless capitalism of the most brutal sort, because they know that such a system would allow them to win still more money and power. This is another reason it’s difficult to imagine a future other than the ones they promote: as the saying goes, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism….
This is why the tech billionaires tell us their futures are inevitable: to keep us from remembering that no human vision of tomorrow is truly unstoppable. They want to establish a permanent plutocracy, a tyranny of the lucky, through their machines. They are too credulous and short-sighted to see the flaws in their own plans, but they will keep trying to use the promise of their impossible futures to expand their power here and now….
Excerpt from More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker, published by Hachette Book Group, New York, USA, 2025, pp. 288-289.
As researched in depth in Becker’s new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, and other tech billionaires envision a future for humanity powered by fantastical technology: trillions of humans living in space, functionally immortal, and served by superintelligent AIs. Instead of addressing the crucial problems we are facing on Planet Earth, like the global climate crisis, they funnel their so-called effective altruism (EA) into funding research and projects for the longterm, known as longtermism.
Paramount to the tech billionaires, and soon-to-be trillionaire, is the propagation of our species for endless future generations to come across our Milky Way galaxy. This techno-dream, fueled by unlimited growth, rests upon technological singularity, usually referred to as the Singularity. Hence their current push to develop a powerful artificial general intelligence (AGI) and human-machine hybrids. This Singularity “will usher in a utopia, end scarcity, and make biomedical discoveries that will allow us to live forever or nearly so” (Becker, p. 22).
According to Elon Musk, as quoted in Becker’s book (p. 223), going to Mars “enables us to backup the biosphere, protecting all life as we know it from a calamity on Earth,” like asteroids, nuclear war, or rogue AI. Or, as he put it on Twitter, “We must preserve the light of consciousness by becoming a spacefaring civilization & extending life to other planets.”
Jeff Bezos, Musk’s space rival billionaire, is concerned about a culture of stagnation if we stay here on Earth. “Do we want stasis and rationing or do we want dynamism and growth?” Bezos asked in 2019, as quoted by Becker (p. 222). “I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system,” he said in 2023. “We can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system…. The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations…. We will take materials from the moon and from near-Earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on,…”
As stated on the book jacket of More Everything Forever, “these futuristic visions cloak a hunger for power under dreams of space colonies and digital immortality. The giants of Silicon Valley claim that their ideas are based on science, but the truth is darker: they come from a jumbled mix of shallow futurism and racist pseudoscience.”
Adam Becker is a science journalist with a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Michigan. He has written for the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, New Scientist, Quanta, and other publications. His first book, What Is Real?, was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was long-listed for the PEN Literary Science Writing Award. He has been a science journalism fellow at the Santa Fe Institute and a science communicator in residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He lives in California.
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Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
China
A pacing threat¹ to American hegemony
slashed with tariffs of 100 percent
—then not.
Chinese hackers
masters of Cyberwarfare
launched Salt Typhoon²
reported in October 2024
worst telecom hack in America’s history
at least eight telecom companies infiltrated.
My little WordPress blog
grabbed viewers from China
four on August 8 then
climbed to 96 by August 30.
Come September the number soared
1716 views on September 15
3347 two days later
the highest number recorded that month.
October showed no loss of interest
2174 views on October 4
2629 six days later
the highest number recorded that month.
What’s up with this attraction?
I don’t follow any bloggers in China.
Did someone share one of my articles
on a Chinese network?
They’re just bots, my techno-savvy son said.
Nothing to worry about.
Internet bots³
computer programs operating on the World Wide Web
invisible robots doing boring stuff for their bosses
shadow thieves harming lives or spies creating havoc.
Are they spiders or web crawlers
indexing my blog content for their search engines?
Maybe a few.
Thousands for over two months?
Seems like overkill.
Are they web scraping crawlers
harvesting data and extracting content
for use on Chatbots?
Possibly.
My suspicious mind says they are
malicious bots—spambots and hackers
searching for sensitive information
harvesting email addresses
installing malware and worms.
I imagine the worst.
I’m totally spooked!
On October 25 the number of views plunged to five.
At month’s end it stabilized at seven.
The Chinese love bomb may have ended
but watchers remain vigilant.
Are they watching you, too?
Footnotes:
- “US leaders view China as a ‘pacing threat’ − has Washington enough stamina to last the race?” by Andrew Latham, The Conversation, October 29, 2025
- Salt Typhoon Hacks of Telecommunications Companies and Federal Response Implications
- “What is a bot?” by Ben Lutkevich for TechTarget Network
Photo by Kalana Amarasekara for Massachusetts Daily Collegian (2024)
My Poetry Corner October 2025 features an excerpt of the ten-part poem “How It Goes” from the poetry collection In the Current Where Drowning is Beautiful (USA, 2022) by Native American poet Abigail Chabitnoy. Of mixed race (Aleutian-German), she is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. She grew up in Pennsylvania where she earned a BA in English and anthropology from Saint Vincent College. She later obtained an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University where she was a Crow-Trembley Fellow, a 2016 Peripheral Poets Fellow, and received the John Clark Pratt Citizenship Award from the University.
In 1901, Chabitnoy’s great grandfather was separated from his family in Kodiak and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, the first federally funded boarding school established to assimilate Native American people into Euro-American culture. Their family’s Russian Chabitnoy surname is the legacy of Russian control of Alaska until the United States purchased the territory in 1867.
Chabitnoy describes her second poetry collection, In the Current Where Drowning is Beautiful, as “a poetic re-visioning of narratives of violence against women and nature.” In poems filled with imagery that moves in waves and use of Alutiiq language, she links the treatment of indigenous women in the United States with harm toward immigrant families and the environment.
Written during the first administration of our current president, “How It Goes” is the longest poem in the collection (pp. 51-56). In the book’s end notes (pp. 93-95), we learn that the title of the poem is taken from the words of a white teenage boy in a red hat during a protest on January 18, 2019, in the Capitol. Smirking in the face of a tribal elder, he reportedly shrugs and says: “Land gets stolen, that’s how it works.” To the poet’s dismay, the boy somehow becomes the victim in the media.
“While I am not convinced the boy meant no harm or disrespect,” Chabitnoy says in the end notes, “I can readily believe he didn’t know any better. After all, this country has fantastic powers of amnesia.”
Although the speaker in the featured poem questioned in earlier poems the wisdom of bringing children into this world, especially a girl child, we learn in the opening lines of Part I that she is open to the possibility: I’d want you to be a girl, even now. / Ashley-Olivia-Akelina-Nikifor—you would have / too many names to go missing. If only one’s name could work as a charm against evil!
Part II presents the numbers of the separated. / detained. / buried. / missing. murdered. prone / to be incorrectly labeled. / massacred (p. 52). To achieve greater impact, the numbers stand on their own, with details provided in the footnotes. Numbered among them are Central American immigrant children forcibly separated from their families, many of whom are also indigenous.
John says he is listening to your concerns. 8-year-old Franklin of Guatemala was reunited with his father and watching them embrace right now it is possible to forget the latest counts 250 or 559 or more than 400 at least 2,000¹ (maybe 14,000)² 186, or more than 10,000³ 500 or 2,000 as many as 15,000⁴ btw 200 or 300 and 500, or 2,000⁵ Jakelin-Albertha-Savanna- colonies of birds are already in decline. cite predation.⁶ (alternatively, such facts vary—by the time you read this we will have forgotten how many. the list grows. but who’s counting?) _______________ ¹ separated. ² detained. ³ buried. ⁴ missing. murdered. prone ⁵ to be incorrectly labeled. ⁶ massacred
After all, the speaker continues, this violence has been the American way since the European conquistadors’ first encounter with indigenous populations (p. 53):
This is America and it is (year-of-our-supposed-lord) ___.
This is America since 1492.
This is America, we were born taking children from their mothers and their fathers.
This is America and we’ve been taking babies from mothers with too many babies
(I.Y.O.) in your lifetime.
This is America and I want to tell you too it is beautiful
but
—vindictive or entombed—
Part IV quotes the smirking white teenager in a red hat, adding a footnote in tiny print (p. 53): “Yeah, well, [kids]* get stolen. That’s how it goes.”
*he might have said “land.” he might have said “women.” he might have been smiling respectfully to diffuse the situation.
Part VIII cites the ways in which indigenous women were killed (p. 55): “by fire, by water, by hanging in air, burying in earth, / by asphyxiation, penetration, striking, piercing, crushing / in a thousand / and one ways.” // You forgot exposure (which Patricia knows in Montana may include stabbing).
Part X gives voice to indigenous girls and women lost to violence:
Now you don’t see us
Now you don’t
I’m not going to play
your blackout games
but know:
my teeth still shine
in the dark.
a body buried still
speaks.
above or
below
don’t imagine there is nothing at the bottom.
Chabitnoy concludes in the end notes (p. 94): “The same narratives that facilitate violence against women facilitate violence against the landscape facilitate violence against indigenous people and other nonwhite populations. And the same hypocrisy, bureaucratic ineptitude, and cultural amnesia allow these violences to continue.”
Learn more about the “Missing and Murdered Indigenous People Crisis” at the official website of the U.S. Department of the Interior: Indian Affairs.
To read the complete excerpt (Parts II-III-IV) of the featured poem “How It Goes” and learn more about the work of Native American poet Abigail Chabitnoy, go to my Poetry Corner October 2025.
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Photo Credit: Taproot Earth
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina caused record-breaking devastation across a 144 mile swath of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. A less often told story is that Hurricane Katrina sparked a mass migration of people. More than 1.5 million Hurricane Katrina survivors evacuated to all 50 states representing one of the largest and most abrupt relocations of people in U.S. history. As of 2015, Center for American Progress reported that 40% of the 1.5 million evacuees, or 600,000 people, were not able to return home. While the idea of “climate migration” is often talked about as an issue that exists only outside of the United States, Hurricane Katrina teaches us that climate migration is also a domestic issue that is already underway.
Excerpt from Remain. Migrate. Return.: What Hurricane Katrina Teaches Us About Climate Migration, PDF publication by Taproot Earth, USA, August 22, 2025, p. 6.
In the featured 2025 Taproot Earth report, Remain. Migrate. Return.: What Hurricane Katrina Teaches Us About Climate Migration, the term “climate migration” refers broadly to the movement of people because of climate change—whether gradual or sudden, voluntary or involuntary, temporary or permanent (p. 8).
Community responses to Hurricane Katrina (2005) taught them that the standards for climate migration are rooted in the Right to Remain, the Right to Migrate, and the Right to Return.
The Right to Remain is grounded in the principle that people have self-determination, power, and resources to remain on their lands and in their communities (pp. 9-11).
The Right to Migrate includes the principles of cooperation and solidarity, as well as legal protections (pp. 12-13).
The Right to Return includes principles of reclaiming power and culture, repairing and restoring the land, plus re-awakening and repairing the spirit (pp. 14-15).
Taproot Earth is a nonprofit organization, registered in Slidell, Louisiana, USA. Their work is rooted in the community responses to Hurricane Katrina (2005), BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Drilling Disaster in the Gulf (2010), and Hurricane Ida (2021). They honor and build on the efforts of Black and Indigenous communities by invoking accountability, abundance, and justice. Together, they are forging connections that strengthen and sustain frontline climate leaders across the Gulf and Global South.
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