Poems by Cordelia Hanemann
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Our Maluku Islands : their green revolution
by Cordelia Hanemann
Cordelia, who misses the great bayou backwaters of her Cajun birthplace, revels in her place in the Piedmont between the sweep of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Coastal Plains of the American East Coast.
strangers come across the broad sea
strangers come from the air with sealed bids
from despots in big houses in the city
to tear down our houses
to rip up our crops / to grab our land
first their road (trucks/bulldozers/machines)
deep scars gouged into our sienna earth :
their new path through the history of my people
where once there was a village
where once there were people sweating in the fields
women standing over cauldrons of soup or laundry
men fishing these seas
now the village is gone / the people wandering
then the miners come : hidden buttons detonate our hills
strip our lands of trees and all growing things :
a thousand-thousand years old and the souls of trees
deep in the earth's new wound : the invisible
now visible beneath the dust : rich seams
of nickel and cobalt for their batteries :
their green revolution : their cars/cars/cars :
our new cloves and cinnamon and nutmeg
to be traded in global markets--our blood / our land
our villages / our ancestors / our people
the sea--its shimmering palette
of turquoise / teal & aquamarine
turned to kemerahan : red //
red for blood red for greed
red for dead : the 11 species of fish
that fed our ancestors : dead
our dead : house/ village/ land/ sea
look at the broken islands : Obi / Ternate / Malamala
from every house burning metal flows : nickel & cobalt
instead of flowers / instead of crops
instead of children / instead of grandmothers
© Cordelia Hanemann