by Cam Finch
You have a river inside you. Your body 60% water.
Your eyes gaze at me through a lens of water as I speak.
This is a poem about water and about you.
*
We gathered at North Hydro Park, to discuss how to talk to you about water. We made a feast and we fed each other. The water we breathed out became home in someone else’s body. We were held and loved by a green space, oxygen, sun, life. No generators, the blackbirds in our ears. We dipped our toes at the shore.
A man caught a walleye, a robin caught a worm, a community caught a town on the brink of a critical choice, a river kept flowing, its body a channel to speak with the past, its body a home to bugs, birds, unborn fish.
*
I trace my finger across the map of Michigan, east along the Huron, from the banks of the park carving out its presence. “I exist and will keep moving!” Its flow asserts like this curve carving my own body in space, this body of water, greeting the Great Lakes, becomes a kidney filtering out human-made toxins. What a gift it is, to be a decentralized river.
*
You are made of water too, don’t forget. Interdependent, global citizen, life map, in affiliation with us all. The Nishinaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson says: “Water asks of us to think on a scale outside of the present moment and our own immediate needs.” You could be a life-giver too.
*
Trace the Huron with your finger, from North Hydro Park to Lake Erie, this kidney outside of you that is you when you turn on your tap. Are you getting thirsty yet for the data center’s waste water?
*
I ask the fourth graders I teach if they know what pollution is. They say yes, of course, it’s forever plastics, it’s in the air, it’s in our water. They don’t say it’s in their bodies. It’s in their bodies, why don’t we say it’s in their bodies. Why don’t we say their bodies are a dumping ground? Why don’t we say that data centers that dump into rivers contribute to harming their bodies?
*
Trace your finger down the map, down the Huron. At each juncture, every town the river touches, remember your mother, warm within her, she who was your first lake. The fluid inside our bodies our eyes, this water we live among we touch we drink how it moves we give this water downriver it flows to others who mother the mothered the people the birds. I want to witness you clearly with the water around us, within us, as you refuse to hand over this water, this land, to be poisoned by institutions clouded by short-sighted profits and war.
*
We can exist without supercomputers, without circling our town in a nuclear bullseye.
We cannot exist without this river, sacred, our watershed, lifeblood. Trace the Huron eastward, we are connected by this water, by the choices we make in this moment, how long the river lives, it keeps going, our decisions, their consequences for generations, keeps going in the bodies of our children, and then your finger is submerged in Lake Erie’s wide embrace. You become that water.
*
Water would reject a business deal with death, water says “I exist and will keep moving.” Water is within you right now, creating the conditions for life, the present and the future, to emerge and continue.
This poem is about you and us, about the water inside us all.
Listen to the poem here:
a map of huron river watershed in southeastern michigan
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Cameron (Cam) Finch is a cross-genre writer, reader, editor, creative, lover of trees, community organizer, and founder of PoetTreeTown. This poem was written in address to the Ypsilanti Township Board of Trustees, urging them to stand with their community, protect and defend their local ecosystem, and say no to University of Michigan’s partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratories proposed build of an AI data center and military supercomputer in Ypsi Township.
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This is an original poem, brought to you by Poet Tree Town, a community poetry-in-public initiative and celebration of local Washtenaw poets. Find out more about Poet Tree Town on Instagram and Facebook, or say hello at [email protected].
