It’s brighter when my eyes are open

My grandfather's first kiss
My grandmother's first sip of brandy
The first African trafficked to the Americas
The first rice grain cultivated in Sahel
The release of Nas' first album
The first execution sanctioned by the first emperor of Mali
The first hieroglyph carved into sandstone
The first self-replication from the first cell to divide
The fusion of the first helium atom in the heart of the first star
These may as well all have happened on the same Monday
September 22nd, 1997, the day before my first birthday
My first memory, crying in the dark
My parents igniting a tungsten halo on the ceiling of the purple room, comforting me
My mother holds my hand with her index finger, my father sings me a lullaby
The argument that they were just having, fades into a past
Which is as distant as the first words spoken in the language which would soon become Patois
This is the first time that I truly glimpsed the concept of ‘coming back’ from darkness
The first time I became aware that things don't ever go away
That there is no ‘away’ to go to
All of these moments are just here, in the storm
We separate them for our convenience, but in doing so, what do we miss?

This is not the first end of the world
We are not the first to live and die
Something always survives
Our children always survive
The survivors must labour in the aftermath of their ancestors’ decisions
We must accept that we are already dead
That we are the stewards of the afterlife
We must tend the garden for the next weary souls to die
There is no ‘away’ for our waste to go
There is no ‘away’ for our technology to go
There is no ‘away’ for our responsibility to go
There is no ‘away’ for us to go
When we dispose of, it doesn’t go away
It fills the craters of the Earth with plastic pus
When we decompose, we do not go away
We fill the stomachs and lungs of our kinfolk with nourishment
We cannot draw a clear boundary between ‘us’ and ‘nature’
We are a part of nature, and nature is a part of us
All of these natural beings:
The trees, the buildings, the internet, the coral reef, the magnetosphere
The fanged teeth, the toxins, the atom bombs, the drugs, the food crop, the temples, the mycelium, the daydreams, the TV static, the summer rain, the night sky
They are just sitting here, in the storm
We separate them for our convenience, but in doing so, what do we miss?