For any who read the PIN my most recent poetry landing on an island artist, Kat Farrins original poem, “small craft advisory” was greatly censored for lack of print space and to keep the focus on the poem. Also because there was the thought that i just may not look my best without censorship. Thank you to PIN for letting my landing contribute
No need to summarize anything. However, a point that is sorely missed, left on the cutting room floor, is how things( people, plants, animals) get mythologized as something other than what they really are. For the benefit of whatever personal conflict the story teller or perpetrator of conflict may have.
This is what I submitted in its uncensored form as an introductory setting.
Save a tree. Cut out this piece of paper
Kat Farrin’s easy wisdom shows here in the face of the (loudest) majority.
Her poetry strikes on a very serious form of judgement. One that destroys beauty and things that are alive. She advises that beauty ought to be considered, and some life might even die for it willingly for what comes before us eventually dies off one way or another without our efforts. Her words remind us making up rules because we think we’re more important than what already lives integrally; animals, plants other people who have survived — have an unheard or disregarded voice — are in need of an advocate — that might object to altruistic claims to manicure spaces.
Kats poem brings to mind a” government extermination campaign and predator control program” that gained hold of Yellowstone National park 100 years ago.
Wolves were mythologized as a danger, thats how the campaign gained hold. One source lets on it was a personal conflict ranchers had with wolves. For some sort of neat profit sake and attempt to control wildlife, the wolves were targeted, in the 1920’s, and eradicated from the area.
The battle cry or claim held against the wolves was they were threatening and diminishing livestock and other wildlife.
Yellowstone went 70 years without wolves. To no great good effect. It altered the structure and function of the entire ecosystem. Therein lies a prompt for question – what’s a place’s function?
Humans think they know what they’re doing, however, we have no great handle on the strength of others, plants, people or animals when we push things toward what we think are “right”.
We open up opportunities for other things – different so called evils – and usually, with humans, once our hands are in the mix, excluding things, making things “right”, it gets more extensively evil trying to tame the wilderness and alter the web of life than just co-existing, integrating with whats already growing, letting things be well enough alone to exist in their own way. I know its hard to deny the reality that some people prefer golf courses and tennis racquets. Fences.
Within the 70 years the wolves (cougars and bears as well) were eradicated and banned from Yellowstone the ecosystem did not thrive with native species. The native elk disproptionately thrived, ruined populations of vegetation, beavers became hard to find, water way contents shifted altering fish populations . So on and so forth until these began to be largely noted in 1970 by a watershed act.
You know what was put into action then that took nearly two more decades to come to fruition?
The reintroduction of wolves into the climate they once reigned in.
In 1995 fourteen wolves from Canada were brought to a valley in yellowstone and 17 the next year. They restablished their habitat and position. Their absense thwarted the healthy connections of an entire ecosystem.
Kat, the captain of lobstering boat, Shewolf, pulled 150 traps onto her skiff for 20 years, mothered four children, and painted many aboriginal like paintings of animals and textures of wind and water on driftwood and rocks before she wrote down the following thoughtful verse. She says it so much more concisely in her poem, ” small craft advisory ” Thank You, Kat for spitting these words out.
small craft advisory
south winds 10-20, gusts to 30
bell buoy wind chime clangs on the pine tree
before light
older daughter sends photos of
4 coyote skulls … very white
mounted by a facebook friend
proud to have shot them behind his house
why can’t we leave well enough alone
google says wisteria is native to north america
yet.. apparently not here
the glorious immense and singular umbrella
blossoming
across from the community gardens
enough to take your breath away
yet slaughtered by the save a tree contingent
invasive …
who knows if the trees underneath might have
willingly volunteered their strangled death for
beauty
……
will rosa rugosa be next
stick to bittersweet
who can argue with that
life sometimes so sweet
and sometimes so bitter
you have to spit it out
True Blue Island 
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