NEW CALEDONIA NATIVES FIGHT FOR RIGHTS

by Lavinia Kumar

New Caledonia has been under French control since 1853. The indigenous Kanak population, who make up approximately 40% of the territory’s 270,000 residents, has long sought independence from France. The 1998 Nouméa Accord provided a framework for gradual autonomy and promised three referendums on independence. The first two referendums in 2018 and 2020 saw close results against independence, while the third in 2021, heavily boycotted by pro-independence groups due to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulted in an overwhelming vote to remain part of France. The recent violence erupted after the French National Assembly approved a constitutional amendment allowing French citizens who have lived in New Caledonia for at least 10 years to vote in provincial elections. This change is viewed by pro-independence leaders and most Kanaks as a threat to Kanak representation, as it could significantly increase the number of pro-France and non-indigenous voters. —Mirage, May 23, 2024. Photo: Police forces pushed back rioters near a shopping center in Dumbéa Sur Mer, New Caledonia, on Wednesday. Credit: Bruno Favre/EPA, via Shutterstock and The New York Times, May 22, 2024.

3000 BC is when Kanaks made home

in the west Pacific, in Oceana,

          south of Papua New Guinea, 

          north of New Zealand.

 

10,000-miles-away-France, took over

the islands in1853, parked its prisoners,

          destroyed crops of the Kanaks,

          forced labor, and brought disease.

 

1854 marked the discovery of nickel,

began years of foreign mine expansion –

            nearly ten mining sites –

            one selling nickel to car-maker Tesla.

 

A 1998 Accord enscribed island voting rights. 

Then 40,000 more French arrived, and

          today rights undone by Paris law—

          expanded migrant voting, diluting Kanaks.*

 

Today Caledonia’s nickel is third in world.

Today Kanaks have no control over the mines.

Today Paris has sent President, ministers, 3000 troops, police.

Today Kanaks block roads, fight for freedom.

* President Emmanuel Macron says he will not force through a controversial voting reform in the French Pacific territory of New Caledonia following deadly rioting. Speaking on a visit to the main island, Mr Macron said local leaders should engage in dialogue to find an alternative agreement for the archipelago's future. —BBC, May 23, 2024

Lavinia Kumar writes in New Jersey.  Her latest poem is here.

CLIMATE DENIER

by Neil Shepard

by John Deering | September 24, 2021

You slept badly last night—

stuck in a Houston oil slick, coughing coal dust

from your West Virginia mines, lapping up

recycled water from fracked shale be-

cause it was the last water on earth –

and woke up speed-dialing the senator

from New York to nail down a deal

on climate change and health care.

Never tell me dreams and symbols

have no power! They’re the right kind

of power, drilled into your rock-bed

politics, reorienting your moral

compass, mesmerizing, magnetizing,

leading you by the nose like a horse to water,

which is how you find yourself at sun-up

ambling down your backyard lawn to Paw

Paw Creek, where you bend to drink,

and rising, look over a green ridgeline

to see your smokestacks black

with coal-ash, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, and

last night’s dream suddenly flashes

in your brain like a stroke and flushes

your gut with acid and forces

your resolve—to call that god-damn

senator from New York before the morning’s gone.

Neil Shepard is an award-winning poet who has published eight books of poetry, most recently, How It Is: Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2018). He has published essays, book reviews, interviews, and poems in numerous literary magazines, among them, AWP Chronicle, Boulevard, Harvard Review, New England Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly. He founded and directed for eight years the writing program at the Vermont Studio Center, and he edited for a quarter-century the literary magazine Green Mountains Review. Shepard has been a writing fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. Outside the literary realm, he is a founding member of the poetry and jazz ensemble, PoJazz. 

BUCHA MASSACRE

by Cathy Hailey

Photo from the streets of Bucha tweeted by Kira Rudik, Member of Ukrainian Parliament, Leader of Political party Golos.

Dead woman 

Perfectly manicured nail

Rises from dirt.

Dead woman

Hands tied behind back

Civilian white tag.

Dead woman

Pulled by rope from road 

Avoiding mines planted within.

Cathy Hailey teaches as an adjunct in Johns Hopkins University’s online MA in Teaching Writing program and previously taught high school English and Creative Writing in Prince William County. She is Northern Region Vice President of The Poetry Society of Virginia and organizes In the Company of Laureates, a biennial reading of poets laureate held in PWC. Her writing has been published in The New Verse News, Poetry Virginia, The Journal of the Virginia Writing Project, Written in Arlington, and Stay Salty: Life in the Garden State (Vol. 2), NoVA Bards, Confetti, and others. Her chapbook I’d Rather Be a Hyacinth is forthcoming in 2023.

TEACHER MINERS OF WEST VIRGINIA

by Alejandro Escudé

The victorious strike by teachers in West Virginia did not only result in a long overdue pay raise. With the exuberance of a nine-day teach-in, the teachers and their supporters have taught the nation a compelling lesson on the historical role of a true resistance. Taking to the streets, picketing on the sidewalks, and charging into the Capitol itself, the strike turned the public commons into a counter space for “we the people.” One by one, the roughly 20,000 teachers in West Virginia essentially forced lawmakers – and the nation – to stop our daily routine and address the growing education crisis on the terms of those most devoted to ensuring the best outcomes for our children: our teachers. —The Guardian, March 10, 2018

The teachers are digging for coal;
They pour out of the mines, dark-drenched,
Unimpressed by the earth’s time tables,
The maps colored outside the lines.
They are heading home from the mines.

The teachers have received the cables
That mark their pay; their fists are clenched
Even grading papers, their precious ore
A losing industry. As the work clock chimes
Apocalypse, for health they pay the fines.

The teachers breathe fumes of a Stygian shoal
As they sail on—confused, wrecked and bled,
Their career an entanglement of labels.
Of their day’s take nothing survives.
They’re servants to the ironies and declines.

Like prophets, they cluster countless Babels,
Their clothes contain the prints of our kindred.
Yet, where gratitude should be, there’s a hole.
A relentless grind, their minds like stripped mines,
For expenses overdue, for quarrying lives.


Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

A WHALE IN THE MINES

by Mary Sexson

How often do whales clean their ears? Well, never. And so, year after year, their ear wax builds up, layer upon layer. According to a study published Monday, these columns of ear wax contain a record of chemical pollution in the oceans. --NPR, Sept. 16, 2013

An exquisite thought,
the whale as the canary
in earth’s liquid mines, its
ear wax the testament to their lives,
to our foolishness.  It reads like
a book, the layered spikes
of fibrous rings pages that reveal
the oceans they traveled,
the depths they plumbed.
The mercury showed up,
and the DDT, the garbage
we dumped into their waters
as they passed beneath us,
these leviathans of the world,
silent singers, filtering
the darkness, listening
with ears we did not know they had.


Mary Sexson is the author of the book 103 in the Light, Selected Poems 1996-2000 (Restoration Press, 2004), and co-author of the recently released Company of Women:  New and Selected Poems (Chatter House Press, 2013, with Jayne Marek and Lylanne Musselman).  Her work has been included in projects such as Arts Kaleidoscope and Poetry in Paint.  Her poems have appeared in various literary publications, including Flying Island, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Grasslands Review.  Her newer work has been published in several anthologies, including The Globetrotter’s Companion (Lion Lounge Press, London), Trip of a Lifetime (Sleeping Cat Books), and A Few Good Words (Cincinnati Writer’s Project).  She has forthcoming work in the Reckless Writing Anthology (Chatter House Press, November 2013).

INTERIOR

by Dale Ritterbusch

Image source: U.S. Air Force

Two dogs bark back and forth, a common
interruption in summer, but this a cold
night in March, still a foot, maybe more, of snow
on the ground.  He listens, stops thinking
for a moment, turns back to his book,
but nothing holds his attention.  Returned from
a long trip to the interior of a place
he had never been before, he
wants to reflect yet at the same time rid himself
of everything he’d seen: a man bit by a venomous snake
who just sat down and waited;
long worms white and thin as spaghetti
swimming like sea snakes in the drinking water;
bodies carved with machetes,
their limbs swelled in the sun like bratwurst;
and children living in the ruins
of a colonial mission, suspicion in their eyes
when any adult walked near.  These were all
things he’d known or heard of before, of course,
no matter where he traveled or when.  Field workers,
maimed and limbless because of mines, neglect, political
philosophy, it didn’t matter.  Better to stay home
and read about the world, to let considered reflection
or a splendid forgetting get in the way,
like that small boy in the road
the convoy didn’t brake for, because no one
stops for anything in that place


Dale Ritterbusch is the author of two collections of poetry, Lessons Learned (1995) and Far From the Temple of Heaven (2005).  He is a Professor of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where he teaches creative writing and literature.  Currently he is the Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English & Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy.