Kate Schapira

Focus poem for direct action

Remember the world that makes you.

I will remember the world that makes me.

I will not be chosen. I will choose.

I’ll keep my wits about me, like a flock of starlings.

Starlings are real birds, real people.

They choose, too. Do not forsake me.

I will not forsake you.

Bioregional (poetics) as body-regional (poetics)

A network of inhabitory gestures

I’m thinking about the ways poets embed themselves within and ply their awareness to particular locales, and I’m thinking more specifically of how such an embodied poetics is enacted as a healing gesture - and how these gestures connect to form a kind of bioregion, one defined by responsive organisms. It’s no wonder they are appearing often of late – it’s been almost a year to the day that we read reports of a newly-discovered crack in the West Antarctica ice sheet that threatened larger destabilization of surrounding areas, and read that a rise in sea level by 10 feet or more was deemed "unavoidable."

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