Three Poems by Harriet Ann Ellenberger

I Resolve To Speak

There’s a fascist in the White House —
a malevolent clown and front man
for a cabal of the hard right.
Their takeover of the US government
proceeds rapidly, a stunning succession
of defeats for democracy.

The nightmares of fascism
are taking shape in waking reality.
Now is the time, I tell myself,
to speak up, speak out,
name the perpetrators,
name their games.

The bully in the White House
has been called a rapist,
and fascism is patriarchy on steroids,
waging unremitting war on nature,
people of color, and women.

How can I remain tongue-tied
in the face of this violent hatred?

I am looking for a way to speak
that does not return hate for hate.
I am looking for a way to speak
with the discernment of love.

I want to say to the men in power,
“What you do is wrong,
and we will not accept it.”
They will laugh at us,
but we will continue, saying,
“What you do harms all life,
and you must stop it now.”

We will speak for love of Earth
and Her creatures.
We will speak for love of each other.
We will speak for as long as we have breath.
With the words we speak,
fear and despair will dissipate.

Our speaking out means we live and love
and refuse all slavery.
Our speaking out means there is hope
for us all.

Breathing Smoke

Horizon to horizon,
the sky is covered with haze —
smoke from faraway wildfires.
Heat bakes the landscape.
The grass dies back.
The hot nights exhaust me;
no air conditioning means little sleep.

I’m warned not to walk outside,
that the smoke from burning trees
has a lethal particulate in it.
I smoked tobacco for sixty years,
and that damage added to the smoke
from trees on fire could spell
the end of my breathing career.

I start to panic,
take a deep breath to calm myself,
and realize that deep breathing
may do me more harm than good.

A week after the haze began,
rain falls, the smoke disappears,
and the heat wave is broken.
I breathe easily once more,
but I ask myself,
What comes next?
One climate-change catastrophe
follows another.

As the years go by,
my life becomes more fragile,
and the life of Earth
becomes more fragile too.
We’re in synchronous waning.

But my heart and my trust
in the Great Round of life-death-life
tell me that Earth
will wax again, will become
resplendent as a full moon
on a summer night.

Humans come and go,
but our Mother knows how to create
new life on our home ground.

An Overwhelming Affinity

I feel your presence still,
though you were absent
when I turned upside-down
the container of your ashes
and let its contents fall into the creek
near our old house.
I was glad to find the exact spot
you’d shown me a year earlier,
but I wondered why the container
held three layers of remains — white on the top,
a thin layer of yellow, and below that
a layer of black.

Aged fifty, and coming from different worlds,
we ran off together
before we knew each other’s stories.

It should never have worked, but it did.

For both of us, what we had together
was what we had dreamt of,
and so we lived in each other’s presence
for twenty-seven years,
until death ended the love affair.

But death could not end love,
nor an overwhelming affinity.

I still remember how I loved to look at you
and listen to your voice
and how the air was electric around you.

The air is like that now
when I feel you nearby.

for Albert E. B. O’Brien
(1948 – 2024)

BIO: Harriet Ann Ellenberger was born in the US and immigrated to Canada at the age of 40. She was the co-founding editor of Sinister Wisdom (1976-81). She also edited She Is Still Burning (2000-3) and co-edited Trivia: Voices of Feminism (2004-8). An e-book collection of her poetry and prose is available free from akadesmoines@gmail.com.

Moderator’s Note: FAR did a review of her prose and poetry book, The Ones You Love. The blogpost can be read here.