The Ionisphere

Photo found online at Storybook.com

New Verse News is a great source of political poetry, a dangerous beast at best. But also an important way to get independent perspectives on current events. On Dec. 4 editor James Penha featured this poem of mine. Poems change each day. If you scroll down after they've appeared, you can find them posted by date in the stack. You can also click on a name to catch all the poems a poet has had posted there. I'm proud to have a half-dozen or so. To check out the site, go HERE.

CLIMATE CHANGE 

The petro-geomorphic freight 

train keeps chugging along

 

dragging

the ionosphere behind itki

like a superhero cape

caught on a junkyard Edsel

Author’s Note: “Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates for using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of phenomena when speaking of objects in the natural world. The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” 

     As a pre-school teacher I learned that we humans learn best by going through the known to the unknown. Instead of substituting “ki” for “it”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate. 

     Indeed, that syllable, “ki”, is a Potawatomi suffix meaning “from the living earth.” Thus, itki means that even what English sees as gender-neutral objects are in some sense alive.