Above the water, a kingfisher breaks the still air.
The midwinter morning sun is already hot –
today will bring no relief to this dry land.
On red earth, the white skeleton of a hippopotamus
rests where last she laid it down,
surrendering finally to drought or time.
Between scattered ribs and thick pelvis,
a dark pile of half-digested grass still holds
the shape of her stomach, proves the power of
teeth that cling to a skull whose flesh now
walks the bush in another’s stomach.
A spike-leafed plant blooms out of season,
betraying immigrant status.
Cocklebur invaders ride my shoe like a Trojan horse.
Across the river, a hippo stares, inscrutable.
Dragonflies hover at water’s edge.
Heron hunts and crocodile dozes.
Was it she who left fish scales and
the dusty reptile print on the rocks at my feet?
Bathtub-rings of salt decorate stone depressions nearby.
Days later and hundreds of miles upstream,
I drive through landscapes blighted by coal mines and power plants,
breathe air heavy with poison haze,
and wonder if these petroglyphs were painted in mercury and arsenic.
Still the hippo watches.
In the shade of a mahogany, a hare keeps one eye on me,
the other facing opposite in the eternal watchfulness
that is the inheritance and burden of all who are prey.
The next morning, I watch a pride of lions
pour itself through tall grass.
My eyes face forward like a lion’s,
but should I be any less vigilant than the hare?
To walk this land is to read a dictionary of dung:
Small pebbles of impala and bushbuck;
Big-as-a-breadbox bricks of elephant poo
coarse with leaf and grass;
Civet middens thick with millipede armor;
Hyena scat the startling white of devoured bone.
Everything sings of the Great Turning:
Life into life into
compost for future life.
Take. Eat.
This is my body, given for you.
Eat, that you may have eternal life.
—
Martin Wagner is an interfaith seminarian training to be a chaplain to environmental and social justice activists. Before seminary, Martin spent over 30 years working as a human rights and environmental lawyer with an emphasis on climate justice. Martin lives in the Temescal Creek watershed on xučyun (Huchiun), the unceded ancestral territory of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, in what is now Berkeley, California.
