poem
Volume 21, Number 1

Initiation Poem

“Corporations spend $2 billion each year targeted specifically on the young, intending to lure them into a life of unthinking consumption. [. . .] Young people on average can recognize over 1000 corporate logos but only a handful of plants and animals native to their places.”

                                               —David W. Orr, quoted in Children And Nature


Our goal was not to save the forest
and animals we knew
but to give them more time

so we jacked up pickups
and stole the wheels,

turned a tractor upside down
in the creek,

moved survey markers
around already-built homes.

We were nine so we painted our faces
like warriors and, at the end,
when developers destroyed our valley
we were still whole enough
to sit on a hill and cry.


—Scott T. Starbuck