They say April is Poetry Month, but when better to honor poetry than May 1, a day for flowers and the weaving of ribbons, and the struggle for a fairer distribution of power.  So, here and now, I venture a kind of writing I have never shared in public before.

Take Power

Will you fight them

On their grounds in their words?

You will lose

And lose

And lose

Lose, lose

Fight elsehow.

Fight with the cry of the osprey,

The stillness of the bittern –

The small one, stalking.

Bring the patience of the ancient

Birch, who spreads her body and papery skin

As table and cloth for the possum

Eating sweet paw paws

And leaving a trail of seeds.

Fight with the grasses’ red tresses,

The fragile fireworks

Of the tiniest flower:

The star of the heaths.

Bring to the fight the flavor of raspberries,

Glistening jewels, clasped in their crowns of thorns.

Bow your thorniness down

And reach for the ground

In limp surrender

And root yourself there,

As Raspberry does,

And, so anchored, grow strong.

Fight with the snake’s silken passage

Out and back in

Through the holes the woodpecker made

In the loftiest pine.

She leaves her skin behind.

A stitch

In time

And pours up that pillar

And along the rafters of the world.

Fight with the yellow and grey

Of the towering clouds before rain.

Make of your thigh-bone

A flute

And sound a note

That shatters the gold-

Plated walls of their blasphemous temple,

Their Jericho.

Big Arts Talking Points: Where Myth & Science Meet

February 3, 2022

In this unusual talk, Sarah ventures onto new ground.  Rejecting the current tendency to pit myth and science against each other, as opposites, she explores the fertile crossroads where the two ways of knowing intersect.

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Use password TP_2022