"I call you back, girl, I call you back.
I am at the other end of this life now
yet your footprints touch mine beneath the sand,
I follow them.
On the beach your sand prayers
ring here still, the Earth
is my witness."
I wrote this poem on the beach at Mendocino, California, exactly a month after the twin towers fell in New York on September 11th, 2001. It was a beautiful day, children were playing in the surf, seagulls calling overhead. And there I sat, while I felt a great cloud of death and destruction gathering far away, a cloud that would soon affect all our lives. And so it was: we saw a 20 year war in Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq. Millions died, mostly civilians. All for what?
As I sat there I remembered a famous 1959 movie with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, based on the book by Neville Shute "On the Beach". Written at the height of the Cold War, it was about a radioactive cloud that had destroyed America and Europe and Russia as the aftermath of a nuclear war, a doom that was slowly moving toward Australia. The people of Australia had just a year to wait for their own demise, and the film depicts how they do that.
Since then a new Tower has been built, Afghanistan has returned to the same tyrants that controlled the country before 9/11 and George Bush's wars, the dead are mostly forgotten, and a whole generation of young people view the whole thing as ancient history. What remains, then and now? Gaia.
ON THE BEACH (Oct. 11th, 2001)
One month after the world ended
The little island world we,
the privileged few, could pretend
was safe, forever, and righteous
The fallen towers, fiery messengers
of unfathomable destruction yet to come.
Tourists walk barefoot on the familiar beach.
They came here, I imagine,
as I have, not to forget, but to remember.
To remember driftwood and high tide -
a red dog and a yellow-haired child
as they enter the water -
their cries of goodly shock and honest forevers
always new, always cold,
always blue.
A white heron,
balanced in perfect equanimity on one leg.
Wave forms overlay my feet......
transparent hieroglyphs of infinity.
Her way of speaking.
Gaia. Her manifest, unspoken words.
A brown man lies beside the mossy cliff,
spread-eagled between sky and sea and land.
Sand sunk, leaf-molten,
blackberry thorn,
into the green:
toes, fingers, flesh
reaching into the green
redeeming Earth.
He is rooting himself.
He is taking himself back.
I lie down in grateful imitation,
a stranger in companionable human proximity
sharing this rite of remembering.
I see her now, I see a girl
walking on this very beach.
Yesterday, and 40 years ago.
Sourcing, she is
sourcing the one who lives here
a river Goddess with no name.
She has made a mermaid offering
of sticks and sand and seaweed.
Companions arrive, offer shells,
and return to Berkeley.
To Vietnam, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall,
the war, the wall,
the war, the walls.
The war,
and the summer of love.
("the revolution will not be televised")
A generation to end war, raise hell,
raise consciousness,
raise Atlantis,
and raise the new and Golden Age
("the revolution will not be televised")
How did we get here from there?
I call you back, girl,
I call you back.
I am at the other end of this life now
yet your footprints touch mine beneath the sand,
I follow them.
On the beach
your sand prayers
ring here still,
The Earth
is my witness.
Lauren Raine (2001)
