BP Oil Spill, REM & Your Part
“This isn’t a movie we can turn off and walk away from…”
Ana Bozicevic and I just drove across the Cuyahoga River in Ohio two days ago, thinking about the water, the oil and this song. More fitting now than ever. Press play, sit back, take it in. Time to own this and do something. Good excuse to pass the Clean Energy Bill, Obama — push your local senators and representatives.
Cuyahoga – (from Life’s Rich Pageant)
Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up
Our father’s father’s father tried, erased the parts he didn’t like
Let’s try to fill it in, bank the quarry river, swim
We knee-skinned it you and me, we knee-skinned that river red
This is where we walked, this is where we swam
Take a picture here, take a souvenir
This land is the land of ours, this river runs red over it
We knee-skinned it you and me, we knee-skinned that river red
And we gathered up our friends, bank the quarry river, swim
We knee-skinned it you and me, underneath the river bed
This is where we walked, this is where we swam
Take a picture here, take a souvenir
Cuyahoga
Cuyahoga, gone
Let’s put our heads together, start a new country up,
Underneath the river bed we burned the river down.
This is where they walked, swam, hunted, danced and sang,
Take a picture here, take a souvenir
Cuyahoga
Cuyahoga, gone
Rewrite the book and rule the pages, saving face, secured in faith
Bury, burn the waste behind you
This land is the land of ours, this river runs red over it
We are not your allies, we can not defend
This is where they walked, this is where they swam
Take a picture here, take a souvenir
Cuyahoga
Cuyahoga, gone
Cuyahoga
Cuyahoga, gone.
AMY KING View All →
Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edits the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry, and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
AMY KING 
This song makes inbetween spaces for one to begin apprehending what has happened, is happening in the Gulf of Mexico, and let that change our lives enough to make a difference. I had reposted on word pond “WHO HAS NO LAND HAS NO SEA” by Fady Joudah from your blog here by way of Poets for Living Waters and someone wrote me: “I had been avoiding the details. Leave it to the poets to rip your heart out.” Many thanks, Amy, for sharing the way you do.