#PoetryFriday–#InternationalWomen’sDay, #schoolstrike4climate

5 Monarchs, Milkweed, and Bees, © 2019 Michelle Kogan, Detail, WIP, oil.

Happy Poetry Friday and International Women’s Day!

My post this week is in response to a poetry prompt from our Poetry Friday host, Catherine Wallian Flynn, at Reading to the Core.  Thanks for hosting Catherine!  She challenged us to write a poem about a woman for International’s Women’s Day. I wrote a poem as a response to another poem called, RISE, by two contemporary, indigenous, women, poets, and warriors, Kathy Jetnel-Kijiner, from “the Marshall Islands in Micronesia” and Aka Niviâna, from Greenland–they co-wrote RISE together and it focuses on global climate change and much more. Click here and you can learn more about these two fascinating women, and view their poem which was filmed on a melting glacier, in southern Greenland.

SISTER OF SEA AND SAND
SISTER OF SNOW AND ICE

Two women
Two countries
Converge to create a path for
All earth’s protection
A path for all people’s dignities

Two women
Two poets
Kathy Jetnel-Kijiner
From the warm waters of the Marshall Islands,
Aka Niviâna
From the cold ice glaciers of Greenland
Converge to perform their soulful poem
On a melting glacier,
“Rise.”

Two sisters
Two warriors
With indigenous connections to their land
With indigenous connections to their past
Sisters of “Oceans and Sand”
Sisters of “Shells and Rocks”
With strong Mother goddesses who’ve
Watched and guided your cultures–
Your voices are heard
Your voices are resonating

Two sisters
Two warriors
I call to you from sandy spring shores of Lake Michigan
Where water temps are rising too quickly for cold-water fish
From city summer backyards filling with milkweed to save monarch’s and bees
From fall’s colored kissed leaves where human and critter prepare for winter
Winters with temps plummeting as low as yours sister of snow and ice
Temps we know are derived from global Climate Change
I call to you from the winter white snow that finally blankets our city prairie,
That quiets our racial injustices, and momentarily quiets our hungry drive for power
I call to you with one voice that is backed by many
Your voices are heard
Your voices are resonating

Two women
Two poets
Became sisters, and call to the world to
“Rise”
Now–
To place the earth and human life
front and center above our material world,
above our greed, and above our differences.
To save our sinking Islands from
Our melting glaciers–
“Rise”
Now
For Now
the Waters are Rising

2019 Michelle Kogan

I also want to bring up the heroic acts of the Swedish, student activist Greta Thunberg, now sixteen, who is actively working to stop global climate change, and involved in the following groups  #schoolstrike4climate  #climatestrike  #fridays4future. She stopped attending school and sat outside the “Riksdag every day during school hours with the sign Skolstrejk för klimatet (school strike for the Climate.)” She demanded that the government reduce carbon emissions in accordance with the Paris Agreement, View more on Greta here.  Below is her eye-opening Ted x Talk. Thank you for leading us Greta Thunberg!