Listening and allow it to touch you soul. I just love the powerful lyrics in this singer-songwriter’s Danielle Ponder, recently performed at NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest. ‘ Poor Man’s Pain.’
“Freedom, won’t you, call out their names, Freedom, won’t you, call out my name. “
Since May, I’ve been sharing my writing on Medium. This is a platform I’ve tired a number of times before but for some reason the habit just didn’t stick. I now know this probably had something to do with having nothing really to say. But now I do.
I’ve been contributing to the Binderful Blog, which a small online community of women, started a few years ago, which offers classes to support women questioning their lives. Maybe shaking up the status quo from the kitchen table outwards. I’m due to create a class with Binderful but in the meantime, I’ve been writing on Medium for them.
If you’re interested in checking out what I’ve shared so far then click below to read the articles.
Pandemic Food Ways: A Little Sweet Treat
Waiting To Be Allowed In
The streets are on fire.
Smoke coats our tongues
like iron in our blood.
We walk for our rights
as weedy paths like barbed
wire lacerate our ankles.
God is in our shouts.
Demands for justice pour
forth smelling of lilies.
Winds of hope on the horizon
are felt like cherry blossom,
delicate and beautiful
but not short lived.
I sit on the bed, cross legged,
window open. Hearing a kid
scream, a car engine revving.
And there, just then, a seagull
flies by carrying bunch of leaf
and twine in its beak. Say you,
what you building? Stealing?
It’s now I’m aware of the trees
trees outside coming into leaf.
Buds unfurling like green ton-
gues with beard and feathery
flower clusters. What tree are
you? And why do you reach so
to the sky as if all that matters
is to grow and thrive? Zooming
traffic, loud, draw my attention
away from nature, from inside
But that’s usually the case with
modern life: a distancing from
our true nature with incentive
of moving faster, go anywhere,
produce anything of fake worth
as if our life depends upon it.
April brings with it the challenge of National Poetry Writing Month. One poem per day for the next 30 days. What better way to kick start my next 100 days of blogging if you take up this challenge. So follow along as for the next 30 days , I’ll be sharing a poem I create, sometimes in response to the prompts posted over here, sometimes from other inspirations. But I’ll be hopefully following the theme of Nature for this body of work.
Day 1 – In these troubling times, our way of being comes into sharp focus
Taking out the rubbish
I’m met by a bully of a bird
on our backyard wall.
He doesn’t take his leave.
Indolent, he waiters along the bricks
beady eyeing me.
Mum used to say things
must be rough at sea
for seagulls to be so far inland.
Today, I don’t think this is the case.
I think people are no longer at sea
forcing these scavengers
reliant on the discarded chip
or bit of fish to become urban
into backyards where citizens
take their recommended
or is it permitted
daily shot of sun while in lockdown.
This seagull surveys the scene.
One foot, two foot, two foot, one.
Head jerking alert, yellow sickle beak,
hooking the air with it’s call.
Grey wings once settled now stretched
wide with an inkling to take flight
but it decides to stay, close.
Two foot, one foot, one foot two.
A shared landscape it’s always been.
Perhaps, now, more obvious
how we all have to adapt
to a new way of being
which might have us all eating grass yet.
Girltrek has announced March 1st as Black Women’s Appreciation Day. It’s about giving thanks to black women we know and don’t know. It’s about publicly flooding the world with thanks and love for black women who have not and continue to not receive their/ our rightful thanks, appreciation, gratitude, props and recognition for all that we do in this world; families, work, society and the Earth.
I totally embrace this day and give thanks to all the black women who came before me, trailing a path. I give thanks to all the black women walking beside me now. And I give thanks for the paths we trail for the black women to come behind us, our daughters. My Miss Ella.
I also give thanks and appreciation for myself. How I daily rock #blackgirlmagic against the odds. #ThankBlackWomen. Pass it on.
Over the weekend, I attended a Wretched of the Earth gathering in London focusing on #climatejustice, billed as Building Our Power. This was a first for me to attend such an event; where I knew the majority of participants would be black, brown and indigenous people as well as gathered together to discuss the climate crisis. I didn’t know what to expect but I was excited about the prospect as far too long I’ve been the only black face in the room when talking about the natural world, the environment and conservation.
The event didn’t disappoint. It was such an amazing and inspiring space to be part of as everything was being co-created; the values and actions, the tactics and strategies of the movement moving forward. What struck me and what I take away with me and move forward with is the way that the climate debate is framed within Western society is wrong and misleading. There has been growing concern for endangered species and the melting icecaps and how we can make a change through recycling and other such individual measures. Yet this narrative keeps hidden the major causes of climate change along with the pain and suffering that has been experienced for decades within the Global South because of such.
Climate Justice is about re-writing the narrative and exposing the inequalities and injustices that have been going on for the last 500 years through colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. This climate emergency cannot be divorced from other issues such as housing, crime, poverty and racism. we enjoy a privileged standard of living in the West because communities and people in the south suffer, be that through being used as cheap labour or have their homes and livelihoods decimated due to extractions industries and drought.
There is so much to be learned around these issues which I’m motivated to explore and share. The creative non-fiction memoir of mixed genres which I’ve been writing this year centres about a black woman’s body with/in nature, I envision to take on a more climate justice stance as I continue to champion how nature has helped me heal and how we, humanity, need to heal through our re-connection with nature.
Living Wild Studios 