The whirlwind dried up into a silence of protruding joints poking out. The muscle  fits into the hollow of my palm. I lift the body that is overflowing my chest with warmth. Pink with a black dot, rumpled mounds of dry skin and thinned out white hairs that the storms laid flat. A patch of brown steeply illuminates the area below the two air openings. Veins of red streams surface from the crevices. One narrow path has been left bald, bare atop. As if bound by invisible weights flowing down onto the body from the lungs.” N.B.

The day after he died, I went into the forest, pressured by the bitterness and the weight on my lungs. My eyes were constantly darting around and looking back, around and ahead, searching for what they had been watching over for eight years. An emptiness lingered behind me, my view awash with salty tears, hoping for the return of what went missing. As I walked on, heavy-pettaled white flowers started appearing. Hellebore – a poisonous plant – a folk remedy for terminating pregnancies. An image of a tired gaze, asking me for help, was spinning in my mind. As if stabbed by a knife, a feeling of having betrayed him overwhelmed me. He wanted to live, up to his final moments – when the body grew too weak, his head drooping and his paws losing their sense of balance. He could no longer stand; he was lying in my arms. And now, having knowingly killed my dog – or should I convince myself that I eased his suffering – now I see the bigger picture brought forth by the gesture of my friend’s death. Paws and body, they are the forests and nature, while the drooping head is just like the disappearing oceans and jungles. He left too early; his body internally consumed by tumors. He was left a skeleton, a mere shadow of the dog he once was. This too is a sight we behold each day; nature fading, fires turning trees into skeletons, plastics poisoning wildlife and contaminating our oceans, seas, rivers and streams. We eat food pumped up with various artificial additives to prolong its shelf life. This is what we feed our pets with, too. We are sick, they are sick. And then what do we do? Do we give ourselves injections to fall asleep?

To face our own parasite, or perhaps conformity?  I took away half of my friend’s life because I was over focusing on myself, but I wonder – how and when will we, as a species, feel the guilt, pain and sorrow when we realise that our slow reactions doomed this wonderful Planet and its ecosystems? Will we snap out of it and change our “norms” and habits overnight? Anyone can contribute to positive change and provide an example for others by behaving differently in their daily lives and professions. Starting with radically changing your diet, cutting out meat, dairy, starting to spend more time outdoors and more frequently, learning how to identify edible plants in nature and planting your own, avoiding shopping centres and cheap textiles, riding your bike more and driving your car less, avoiding buying products wrapped in cheap plastics, joining activists at climate rallies, creating more opportunities for rescuing and helping animals as well as people… by taking small, but determined steps to become the part of the change that is, at the same time, our only chance of survival. But also, to protect other species from extinction in the time to come.

This piece is a participatory installation consists of poetry, drawings, sound and objects taken from nature and returned to it. It was exhibited as a part of group exhibition How to Look at Natures?-Art and the Capitalocene

“Have you ever witnessed dogs or cats adopting some of our states and illnesses? If so, share that experience in a few of sentences.

Poems:

IN A NAMELESS DREAM

In a nameless dream, the paws and body flinched rhythmically.

 Sensing a deer

Mud beneath the grooves of the nails, the thistles playfully stuck to the coat

Decomposing forest corpses buried beneath the humus, anticipating your rolling

Duplication and camouflage

In order to soar through the scents even faster

To mark the paths known to no one but you

To compete with fungi and moss

The guttural release of your hushed bark

Flows through my lungs and I laugh

Imagining you coming back unrecognisable

Today I awoke from dreaming of you dreaming

And catching the dust

Latching onto my salty face

MONOCHROME (c)anine autism

There was undergrowth across the road

Darkness was wheezing under shaky branches

You were standing on the wall

Teleporting into branches

The neighbour told me;

“We will be parents

Both of them escaped

And she was in heat”

The monochrome path of white fur

Laid down by tiny brown dots

She scraped the steps left behind

With cyclic dog stunts

Through layers of runaway seconds

On a leash provided moments later

In a small semi-circle of ignoring

Or quick casual sniffs

The tail upright like a radar

Receiving scent puzzles

Briskly avoiding all else

Disinterested muteness

Devotion to greenness

 tree skins

a landscape in shrubbery

discovered stops

sieved autism (towards his own kind)

While December and November were too warm

The lifted paw was adjusting

Other smells

Remaining airborne too long

And when you would lap water at nighttime

Or get sick

The hairless areas radiated coldness

After the first long emptying of the bladder

You turned around, dragging in the direction of home where the pillow resides

In close proximity to the radiator

This proximity interrupts the flow of my body

The unfilled places

The ringing ears materialising

The offspring

That you never made

AIR GONE WARMER

The waves of green shadows stretch the soil

The expanse pouring over the scattered flower heads

Sods of grass warming the air

With trees resonating from a distance

Sweetly stretched out through invisible trajectories

Filled with particles of birdsong                      

The topography of smells carrying the thought:

“Maybe now you’re the awakened bumblebee,

gently decoding the newly opened stamens?”

I look back at the well-known meadow,

 That one time when it was full of red clover

Strewn with thick bee bodies

Cleaned in a children’s neighbourhood clean-up

Somewhere below the lung bones

You are with me

I’m looking back in thoughts

To construct your body rubbing

Against the bitter dandelion sprouts,

And the emerging molehill cake

Hearkened by the energy of thriving

In WAITING

Through the efforts of the eye muscle’s tickling

The mountain ahead is silhouetted

My eyes are locked on the white spot in motion

The drawn up strength

A tangle of forest shadows

The chased down smell of rabbit hops

Labyrinth zones of trajectories

Are connected with movements

Of lungworts and yarrows

In waiting

The point of progress

 is approaching

from an unbelievable source

Anachronistically brown

observations of the wetness

the traces of soil disappear

a metamorphosis of vibrations

contagion

pulsations of joy

Eyes brimming with the pleasure of digging

rolling around in mud and carcasses

why didn’t I stop the flash

(now) scattering while being extracted from the collage of memories

---