Poetry

A Lake in Florida Suing to Protect Itself / Shilpa Kamat

Finally, I think, a headline that is a poem.

Finally, I think, the collision of indigenous sentiment and postmodern sentimentality and The

Law.

When I was a kid, we drove up from Miami to stand in lines in the heat for a ride 

and another, then another; to see adults in familiar costumes; to buy mouse ear hats.

I never knew this lake existed.  

Sometime soon, 

Lake Mary Jane may stream into the courtroom and refuse to be commodified.

At the same time, someone may be rowing past cypress knees as an egret wades.

At the same time, I may be quaking in my Mary Janes–

because I want this for the lake

because I want this for the forest

and by the I mean every

and by every I mean for us to return 

to relating rather than objectifying– 

to trusting the old growth roots

of our brains, of our tongues.

When I was a kid and moved to Georgia, I fell in love with the pines and red clay

then watched in despair as they were destroyed to build more and more identical buildings

strip malls facing strip malls with all the same items

with large lots and expansive roads before them

and I learned that I would have to drive for miles, and I learned

that my house, too, was built

where a forest once stood.

Somewhere in Lake Mary Jane

swims an alligator who thinks 

of the wetland as its abode.

Somewhere in Lake Mary Jane

a wood stork who is nesting

on an islet follows its community

into muddy waters.

They do not know they are in peril.

They do not know they have advocates.

If there is ever a time for prayer, meet me here in these lines

and think of us all–current manifestations of the evolution of single-celled organisms 

struggling to balance our web of relationships.

When I was a kid, I learned to draw the roots of trees, watched 

a streetlight on the horizon as we drove in Minnesota prairie 

then realized it was the moon.

We are accustomed to stories of peril, of pavement 

We are accustomed to knowing that we impact land and water and sky.

Rain streaks glass, and we watch from inside.

“Each time there is a movement to confer rights 

onto some new ‘entity,’ the proposal is bound to sound 

odd or frightening or laughable,” Stone wrote. “This is 

partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights we 

cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of ‘us’—

those who are holding rights at the time.” 

These are words of a lawyer that are fit for a poem. 

If there is ever a time for prayer, SING/THINK/SHOUT your concurrence.

Radical, O’Neal says, is Latin for root. 

“...and that’s exactly what this is: change at the root.”

If there is ever a time for prayer 

then pray that the lure of false profits

does not lead us to annihilation.

We are the guardians of all the natural places we stumble upon

that are now our responsibility to acknowledge and protect

that render us nameless 

even as our minds stretch 

to name them.