Nickel Litany

Nickel mining is worsening. Illegal mining activities are becoming more widespread, leading to severe environmental damage, including deforestation and water pollution

The river of caramel color in Tambaksua.
The river that weeps your exhaustion.
The river that aches in your falsity.
Scented with iron.
Perhaps even the hands of iron. Seizing the prayers of Ahoma.
Forcing the silent sea to hold the shards of death.

Greed scattered across the deltas.
Lumps that carry your golden teeth.
The river’s arms copy foreign faces.
In the sea, fishermen pray:
“Let all sunsets end in the morning and afternoon.”
Until the dock refuses to be stepped on.
You are tossed between money and death;
in Tambaksua, every finger of the river reaches a dead end.
Failing to grow acacia.
As if the brittle forest lost the language of its roots.
For the flood sends the anoa to another continent.

2022