I Voted

I voted.

I voted for the rainbow.

I voted for the cry of a loon.
I voted for my grandfather’s bones that feed beetles now.

I voted for a singing brook that sparkles

under a North Dakota bean field.

I voted for salty air through which the whimbrel flies

South along the shores of two continents.
I voted for melting snow that returns to the wellspring

of darkness, where the sky is born from the earth.

I voted for daemonic mushrooms in the loam,

and the old democracy of worms.

I voted for the wordless treaty that cannot be broken

by white men or brown, because it is written in star semen,

new moons, thistle sap and weevil hieroglyphs on prairie oak.

I voted to erase straight lines and right angles.

I voted for the sacred curve of rivers and hills.

I voted to keep the edges of the vineyard ragged

and ungleaned for the hungry stranger.

I voted for lonely pilgrims who wander

in the ambiguous land between male and female.

I voted for open borders between death and birth.

I voted for the commonwealth of the ancient forest,

a larva for every beak, a wing-tinted lupine

for every moth’s disguise, a well-fed mammal’s corpse

for every colony of maggots!

I voted for the mule that Jesus rode into the city,

proclaiming forgiveness of debts,
who is the same mule Rumi rode backwards into exile,
gazing Eastward toward eternal loss.
That mule, I tell you, will be president!

I voted to compost and manure the floor of the Senate,

entangling 100 senators in hemp moss and honeysuckle.

I voted to turn the dome of Congress into an enormous

hummingbird feeder.

I voted to wash away both white and black

in a rainbow of tears.

I voted for a motherland where politics dissolve

into folk music, story-telling, fermented cabbage,

totem-carved hoes handed down from mother to son

in the fire-side quietness of heroic listening.

I voted on the ballot of a fallen leaf of sycamore

that cannot be erased, for it becomes
the dust and rain, and then a tree again.

I voted for the local, the small, the brim
that does not spill over, the abolition of waste,
the luxury of enough.

I voted for more fallow time to cultivate wild flowers,

more recess in school to cultivate play,

more leisure, tax free, more space between days.

I voted to increase the profit of evening silence

and the price of a thrush song.

I voted for ten million stars

in your next inhalation.

________________


A poem from my book, The Nectar Of This Breath
Chalk mandala by biology teacher Karyn Babaian.