a poem for Kashka
The tipping point is here. There’s no going back now, only forwards towards our demise. The future we wrote when we decided we valued a concept called money over people – or the planet. Them in charge never listen to kids like us. Bold, brash, unafraid and coming at their systems sideways, calling bullshit on the lot. Maybe your lungs failed you because the world was too toxic for you to take, its plastic poison seeping into everything we hold dear. But, dear poet, you somehow still managed to share your spirit through it all, laughing and loving and fighting and breaking every rule until the very end. Glitter and ash to the last. 2016 has been a year of many losses, the Anthropocene the age when loss became the word on the tip of every tongue, from the prophets to the pharaohs to the senile who are lucky they get to forget before the rest of us recall what we are losing.
My favourites are leaving here, slowly at first, then faster, like a river picking up steam, or maybe that’s just me getting older, and life getting more like itself, and less like the unassuming stream it seemed when I was a child, for now I see the direction it is headed, the steady march towards an inevitable end, a coda worked through to its structural conclusions. If we are wise we will stop and take it all in.
The question hangs in the air: what then is the mission if we already know how the song goes?
I suppose it’s the same as it’s ever been – to listen, and learn, and create with abandon, stretching yourself until you reach what you think must be your maximum capacity for love – and then, to say goodbye, to teach your heart that it can grow a little bigger, still, even as it breaks.
