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.
Use password TP_2022