I Ulu I Ka Aina: Land

Day 223: Sinking Bodies

1 Day 223: Sinking Bodies Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio When it gets cold outside and you got nobody to love understand what I mean when I say there’s no way we are gonna give up like a little girl cries in her bed at a monster who lives in her dream is there anyone out there cuz it’s getting harder and harder to breathe 2 weeks ago our turetic earth ticked in the aftermath of God’s anger Haiti felt catastrophe shaking in the number 7 the death toll is 233,000 and counting today, Chile felt the same learning to find fear in 8.8 2 million people have been displaced i’m sitting at my computer watching the number rise it feels too much like H a i t i K a t r i n a I n d o n e s i a it’s been 50 years since Chile has been shaken like this when in the 1960s six thousand dead bodies fell through the cracks, sixty sunk in Hawai‘i They call this Global Warming the climate correcting itself I call it earth rattling quaking plates shifting tsunami lifting the sea is rising and in my tiny Honolulu town that means Underwater homes There is a wall of water taunting my homeland I’m two thousand miles away the phone lines are hollow like opened graves in Hawai‘i brown bodies are born asthmatic choking from first inhale 2 | I Ulu i ka ‘Āina running from an aquatic mountain it is no wonder we cannot breathe This is the reality: Global Warming will break the foundation of a community without even shaking the penthouse suite so while the men and women who finance the earth’s deterioration play the role of its savior sipping martinis in hybrid glass-bottom boats tallying the brown bodies that float by this society’s roots are sinking in quicksand our hands above our heads trying to form prayers for relief funds hoping that the government might soon start funneling money back into education so the next generation, if there is one, will learn how to prevent this from ever happening again it is as if the government thinks that if we are uneducated we won’t be able to be ashamed of them won’t understand that the elite only have faith in the privately educated that the rest of us, don’t even stand a chance We’ve made life a privatized institution only the privileged can afford to survive cut the crap it’s 2010 Chile been hit by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake sending a tsunami to Hawai‘i but you see we were lucky cuz the tsunami barely hit Hawai‘i’s shores but our children were already sinking anyway because the government’s idea of solution to the economic depression is Furlough Fridays instead of cutting from our 1 trillion dollar war we’ve taken school days from our offspring and we all know the environment is dying because our legislation is failing to teach our children to sprout through concrete enough with the quick-fix band-aids and budget cuts! it’s time to fill classrooms not empty them unloading our brown bodies over seas to fight “terrorism” will not lighten our island enough to keep it afloat Osorio | 3 It’s 2010, the plates beneath our feet are just beginning to strike back it’s time for a solution time to stop counting backwards to H a i t i C h i l e I n d o n e s i a don’t let the rhetoric fool you there is nothing natural about the way we’ve destroyed our planet Haiti is just 9/11 from a different angle we are our own worst enemies terrorists dressed as “patriots” look around you the death toll is rising with sea level we are all still counting sinking bodies it is time to decide who is gonna be privileged enough to survive next time ...