Please try to listen
Even though I speak a language
You do not seem to want to learn
Or care to understand
You have tried
For hundreds of years now
To fence me in
To turn me from a living, moving muse
Into something tamed by you
Held fast with nails of wood and iron
Fixed
Mapped
Pinned
Controlled
You’ve hammered piles
Nailed wooden boards
With fibres ripped
From forest core
The rent and stolen wood
Thrust down
Crammed
Forced
Driven
Without accord
How many times
Has this, your will-imposing self
Cleaved down its pain
Into my softly sanded spine?
Mistaking yielding for consent?
You’ve tried to tame, to temper me
To fix me fast
Forever held your slave
But even as you nailed, you failed…
My lover, Tide
Has kept her watch
And stayed
And slowly kissed my sides
And pushed, and swept, and moved with me
Forever here,
Her wavered, folding form,
Like mine unfixed,
Has listened, held, and swept
Our silted, sandy core
In common unity
Both in and after sun,
Westward each day
From morn ‘til night
And all night too
Through each and every hour
When darkness, our best time,
Gives brief respite
A lightless pause
When you are never here
Across these hours
Together, we have
Ground your halting, human bonds
Into a papered pulp
Slowly
Strongly
Wilfully
And still our power pounds apace
The force of both our hearts
Beats on
As boulder clay dissolves
Our tidal drum unstopped
Unstoppable, and firm
Will beat the tide
Until no single wrack of you,
Nor of your world,
Survives
And in this dance of life,
In freedom’s victory,
We ask you simply this to hear:
We are not you
Nor do we live
To answer your commands
