earth day my ass
Marooned, moaning harbor
Seals, tears from dives
Dreamt, Dungeness crabs
These masked men yell
“They gotta kill these fat fucking things”
Food is frivolity of human
Flotsam, here staking out
Rebar and footings
A sunset skipping off
Backs of seals, ricocheting
Through prisms of blown glass
Found in the tourist havens
They are in their cups
Covid shots of Jose Cuervo
Crab sliders dripping
Mayo and butter
Flocking Californians
Portlanders, seeking
A bender on sacred beach
Salish fresh water mussels
Miles from their barbeque
Fun, kites the shape of
Teletubbies, gaping gray whales
Eyes averted now
Paranoia distilled finally
The lockdowns, the Zoom
Rooms, until out alone on beach
Heads down, faces covered
Like limping overweight
Strong arm robbers
Most don’t look at Canada
Geese V’s, or bald eagles a mile
Above, instead, praying for crabs
Cold Coors closeted away
Styrofoam picnics
Guzzling legs, picking through bodies
They pull down mask, chug, chew
Chins covered with plastic surgical
Jokes, garlic salt juice flowing
Eyes toward imagined beds of a thousand
Crabs crawling, these boys and girls
Hoping crab pots hold holy grail
More slabs of marine meat
Pulled and frozen, ready
For more masked men and women
Trip home, cursing traffic, cussing
Shit from gulls on SUVS
Looking out into Pacific
Praying for another cold cerveza
Down the road, wishing
No more Indian talk
No Black lives matter
The entire shit show that is
Is their birth right to condemn
Flagging ancestors of first
Colonizing boats
Tired of so much, so many
Hoping again the trip
Back home leaves them
Dancing to Jimmy Buffet
Enough of this Indian-Black-Chinese
Stuff, can’t we all just get along
Around the crab fry
With cold sir-vas-ah, Corona too?
Paul Haeder, Author 
Thanks Paul. Very good! The ancestral habit of celebrating by eating. Maybe eating sustainably, minding all creatures, at least on Earth Day?……… Fat chance
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Just a little thorn in the side of this Coast, where driving 101, hunting for the greasy crab meal, and retail disease rules. Food — real food — and real communitarianism, and, well, Maria, there is so much to unpack outside the poem —
https://dissidentvoice.org/2021/04/gates-unhinged-dystopian-vision-for-agrifood-must-not-succeed/
Quoting the intro — and there are tons of hot links to sources in this, something the average Yanqui hates:
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in the recent report ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and new genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agrifood corporations.
+–+
Then my series, up as a single long ass piece here,
Capitalism’s Deadly Quartet — Food, Plastic, Air, Weathering
The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
— Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
https://www.laprogressive.com/hiking-along-the-wrack-line/
Thanks for your support, Maria!
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