The Feds cut me good in ’62 dropping the monstrous guillotine at beloved canyon Glen. My breasts pierced, my arteries flowed brown and red, my soul sent careening into muddy oblivion.
Was this the best way to show man’s love and respect for sacred waters, to please an Arizona woman, she who guards your oasis civilization? No answers came but even n more havoc lay ahead for me — Arizona woman.
Like mindless drunks, growth maniacs those who cannibalize nature, they were not done — they sawed my limbs, the yellow ponderosas, three shifts day and night, crippling me with chain-logging, clear cuts and dynamite all for TV cabinets? What a way to treat a woman. Hawks and condors say I should sue for rape and pillage, and circling above me they wonder what I shall do — I wonder too. Who is able to weep for anything, should weep for me — Arizona woman.
Then came a new brand of love power plants that filled the skies with yellow poison, clogging my lungs, defacing ancient places, I am a woman in hell. So too is my sister the Green now roiling with nuclear wastes near Moab.
Why why why — when, when when will I be set free, too many feelings, so many questions.
I am the cut body of a coyote, the cougar strung up on its hind legs off a trail, too close to gated communities they must have come, the condor shot from the sky by a dumber than whale shit rancher I am the native plants bulldozed for swimming pools and timeshares, I am a desert bighorn sheep infected by disease that made me go blind. I am the antelope run down in Prescott by an 18-wheeler. Is this any to love me, your Arizona woman?
Must I go dry before the warnings of the ancient ones who emerged from my waters come true the frog does not poison the world and drain the pond in which it lives.
If you won’t Love me, then at least leave me alone.
Thank you.