Writing poetry is a venue for complex and messy feelings. It’s a means to open hearts, to touch others in places of their souls they didn’t know exist while diving into the meaning of my own complicated soul. I believe that there lies strength in turning adversity, trauma and emotions society has told us to keep quiet about into beauty. Words weave us together. Poems build bridges. From one human experience to another. Recently I wrote in my decomposition book dedicated to my poems: I am here to feel and to write about it. This is a hard truth I know about myself.

Writing over the past months has put and kept me in a bubble I needed to be in. To get me through the pandemic while being at home with my children and husband 24/7, meeting the needs of four people (mine included) constantly. Writing regularly has filled my heart with satisfaction. Putting my poems on a blog has been an act of accountability rather than vulnerability. 

But today I want to scream, to stomp my feet, to turn into a storming stampede of bulls, or rhinos, or bison, or any other big horned animal. I want to embody what I feel rather than to write about it. Today I am hopeless, doubting that my poetry does anything. Do bridges change the world?

Words don’t change minds. Actions do. 

Even if I were a stampeding herd, as a woman I would be told to be overreacting, to be too much. To stop the fuss and stay quiet. You are not physically harmed by a road. So why do you care so much? Why get churned up in something out of your control? 

Because the older I get the more I am awakening to the wrongs in the world. Being on this planet is not just about me. Now that I have children, I am worried and sometimes devastated for their future. For all the damage we have done for them to live with. What about their children? That one particular road won’t hurt them either. But if roads and mansions are all they get to see and be surrounded with, I worry about them. 

Where to turn then with my despair and anger? I turn to writing, because that is what I know, even when it feels small and insignificant. What I don’t know is how to call for action. How to make greed stop. To create poems so powerful that they could form literal herds of rhinos and bison and bulls that would bring the change I want to see. Change that would protect the San Marcos Foothills for instance, because developers could let go of their blind pursuit of profit. 

If every effort fails and they build the road we don’t want, I know that I will keep coming back to the San Marcos Foothills. I will see the road as the scar it will be. And I will mourn. And I will be witness to the land. If everything fails, I will write about it, make people aware. Some may open their eyes if not their hearts. Some may see. When I cannot stop greed, I will bridge the hearts of those who will mourn with me, because that is what I know to do. 

I wrote this post a day before the beginning construction of a road on the San Marcos Foothills. On this day, I did not know the outcome of the planned sit-in, nor any other development of the project. While the building of houses has been delayed by legal actions, a permit for the road slipped through. There may be a road even when the houses never get built.