04-14-2021

 

Deborah A. Miranda

 

HOW TO LIVE IN THE BURNING WORLD

 

…is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world? – Barry Lopez

 

Tell yourself it’s like sitting at the bedside

of your mother; scorched with cancer,

her hand already almost ash in yours,

her words already smoke so thick

it obscures your vision of a future

without her. You want to look away.

You want to find a cave, drink yourself

into oblivion, sleep while ugliness smolders.

Admit it. You want someone else to tend

the deathwatch. Instead, moisten her tongue

with a sponge; bathe dry skin

with lavender cream; braid her hair

with tender, trembling fingers. Take care

not to pull on knots. Stay in the room:

let the last thing she hears

be your voice, thanking her

for every single time she didn’t

kill you, for the eons she waited

before you realized her brilliance,

her wisdom, all the days she bit

her tongue, let you think you had

the last bloody word.

 

You aren’t required to love the flames.

 

But love the burning world.

You owe her that. Fear is no dishonor.

Her fever so hot even metaphors

melt at a touch. Memorize her.

Praise each scar on her body,

beauty ablaze. Pray for a clean

ending, a phoenix purification.

Pray for mercy. Pray for the only thing

that can save us now:

every lesson she ever taught us

about the sweet, bitter grace

of transformation.

CORAZÓN ESPINADO

 

In the beginning

she is salt, indigo and jade,

fire and magma.

 

She is prowl and push.

Land births herself:

eruptions red as first blood

 

accordion into ridges,

braids and breakage,

until wind and water

 

cool her ropey coils,

black body baptized,

lifted above the horizon.

 

Here, God is a seed

sown by chance.

Here, rock is womb.

 

Fine silvery roots spin

a seedling: world-maker,

queen born of water,

 

she grows her own

green heart of spines

crowned with golden jewels.

 

OFFERINGS

 

At dawn the songs begin again as if never sung before,

as if the jet stream has not wandered from its path,

 

the Arctic ice shelf does not melt at accelerated rates,

Sudden Oak Death does not leapfrog across the continent;

 

Shenandoah Valley songbirds lean into the indigo air

as if two thousand snow geese did not fall from the sky

 

in Idaho, ten thousand sea lions are not washing up dead

in the Channel Islands, train tanker cars full of chemicals

 

never crashed into the Kanawah River in West Virginia.

As if California’s Central Valley agriculture is not pumping

 

twenty-thousand-year-old water out of ancient aquifers

that cannot be refilled. These song warriors pitch morning

 

as if the territorial prayers of robins keep bee colony collapse

disorder at bay, as if crows stitch each torn morning together

 

with their black beaks, mockingbirds know the secret

combination of notes that command God’s ear, the low coo

 

of mourning doves weaves feathery medicine; they persist

as if pine warblers, flash of gold in treetops, coax the sun

 

up by degrees, as if these musical beings don’t know the word

extinction, as if, knowing it, their silvered melodies insist

 

like the yellow warbler: sweet-sweet-sweet; little-more-sweet.

​

-from Altar For Broken Things (BKMK Press 2020), selected by Spring 2022 Guest Editor, CMarie Fuhrman 

​

An enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of California, poet Deborah Miranda was born in Los Angeles to an Esselen/Chumash father and a mother of French ancestry. She grew up in Washington State, earning a BS in teaching moderate special-needs children from Wheelock College in 1983 and an MA and PhD in English from the University of Washington. Miranda’s collections of poetry include Raised by Humans (2015); Indian Cartography: Poems (1999), winner of the Diane Decorah Memorial First Book Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas; and The Zen of La Llorona (2005), nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. Miranda also received the 2000 Writer of the Year Award for Poetry from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. Her mixed-genre collection Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) won a Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher's Association and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Award.