This afternoon, as I walked through the woods, I thought about fracking. I thought about how my home is, in part, warmed, by the act of splitting the body that gives me life.  A year ago I created this poem by erasing words from an article I had read online (also know as an erasure poem).

“The Great Shale Gas Rush”
(an erasure poem adapted from the  above titled Businessweek.com article by Jim Efstathiou Jr. & Kim Chipman)

Homes sit atop debate
noise. Muddy water pouring
from taps, chemicals
in a neighbor’s well. A
beautiful rural area

Fracking

smash rock
free gas
clean energy shale rush
creating jobs and fluid
spills overwhelm
plants

A radioactive river
struggles to hold
authority

It’s impossible to miss
the power

While I walked today, I also thought about communities of people reconnecting to the Earth they have forsaken. I saw them in the fields I passed, meditating and mixing their energy with the Earth’s. I am reading a book called Desert Sojourn by Debi Homes-Binney, a memoir about the author’s 40 days of solitude in the desert of Utah. There is a reason why people return to the source of their cells for answers to the questions that trouble their minds. I can’t tell you how many times the woods have healed me.

And I thought about that great floating island of plastic in the pacific, too large, most think, to manage. Yet, I can’t erase the images of albatrosses dead from starvation, their stomaches bloated with bottle caps. “Anything is possible,” a friend told me today during an unrelated conversation, “our only limitation is belief.” If I can fix my body, surely we can fix our Mother’s.