Collective Liberation Love Song

If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time.

But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine,

then let us work together.

—Aboriginal activist group, Queensland, Australia, 1970s

You are a cloud

a pear, liquid brown eye

with lashes over red thighs

staghorn sumac, opening

in the earth body you emerged

at the succession edge

where forest, field & water lay

you sing down from above

you give great swoops of flight

in rolling yellow finch strokes

the places you call here are home

you teach time by shade, by temperature

your ease is ocean restlessness

haunting whale song

your bodies are medicine

always curvaceous, never reduced

by the squint project of agrilogistics

your efficiency pronounced in chloroplasts

grace in minnows & malachite stalagtites

you are lover, relaxed, electric, sated

whom the wind of deserts cool

luminous creosote musk

your many folds erotic

full, enveloped, ripe

there is no other

there is no elsewhere

you allow wholeness

bringing tears

that rise up

up up

up