exploitation – Tao Talk

dVerse Haibun Monday and earthweal weekly challenge — (river) bed’s graveyard

Algae in a water sample from the St. Croix River, magnified about 200x. (Photo by Aiden T., student from Lee & Rose Warner Nature Center) Just as a forest provides a specialized ecosystem that includes shelter for its inhabitants along the food chain, so too does a river. Having grown up and lived my life…

dVerse — Poetics — The Death of Dolores Haze

That summer when sweet dew was on the rose she danced and played along the merry lane while mother hummed a tune and hung the clothes. Yet ill winds soon would spin the weather vane. A stranger from Bigtown, in fancy clothes, arrived and said he’d traveled on the train. Slack-jawed and bug-eyed, looked just…

Court of Federal Claims Dismisses Bad Men Clause Suit over Sexual Abuse Perpetrated by Stanley Weber — Turtle Talk

This is one of those cases where you wish you were in a nightmare and could wake up from it. It is about a known pedophile that abused and exploited children at a health clinic for over 20 years. The pedophile was eventually charged and convicted for some of the abuses years later and now…

dVerse and earthweal OLW 107– Sparrowlet Form — Lakota Lament

We did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’. Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was it ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded…

Doe Meat

I went to the far reaches of the county a couple of weeks ago to look at a house my older son was interested in (parents can do things like this when they are retired and their kids work full-time and do college in the evening) and drove past this place. It has been doing…

dVerse — OLN #305 Live! and earthweal OLW #96 — Dispelled

Padding along cushioned unfamiliarwhere fungi creeps unmolested alongfallen limbs from long-distant lake gusts My blue gps dot with flashlight incrementsthe pixel-dashed trail scalloping theinland lake to the marked ruin of tribes and boys. Carved cold granite icon topatriarchal rights of domains and souls.Resting on the crumbling concrete baseof a dining hall that fed the damned…

dVerse — Poetics — Reaper’s Prophesy

Sand, once forest, graveyards for ghosts of trees, soft whistles in breeze soon rumble with trucks laying foundations, proclamations of soulless dominion over ten thousand things; foul matricide. Sand, once forest, crawls with mud and afeared who claw for last arks for floods consume waste. Jack o’lantern face grins grimly when they gurgle, flounder, sink…