Direct action organiser and activist Lilli Barto delivered the following poem to a protest, organised by the Sydney Anti-AUKUS Coalition, outside the Indo Pacific International Maritime Exposition on November 4.
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The Hurricane
And what if our empires crumble and fall,
Before we’ve learnt to see over their walls?
What if the market finally crashes
Before we’ve learnt not to be so distracted
Manufactured, detached and fractured
Stripped of the wisdom our ancestors practiced
Scroll past that shit
I’m just looking to relax, no facts or praxis
If you donate today, Commbank will match it
Ain’t it tragic?
But what can you do when there’s no time to fact check?
No space to process or protest this progress
No days of rest when each day’s a stress test
Live fast and hollow ’til life’s just slow death
Devoid of context, we latch onto anything that helps us make sense of this mess
We wanna right wrongs but can’t find where they started
I’ll follow anyone who points me at a concrete target
As long as I can keep my preconceptions and my guard up
Ain’t no problem can’t be solved by an innovative start up
And I just hope we’re ready
For the hurricane we’re facing
But when they need to
Human beings can be quite amazing
But what if there’s a limit and we’ve already passed it?
What if it’s collapsing and it’s only getting faster?
Incomprehensible in its complexity and vastness
Do we understand the questions that it’s rising up to ask us?
And what if we look back on this from the smoking aftermath
And think “I can’t believe we didn’t see this coming in the past!”
When they took our tools away and told us that we couldn’t build
Then paid us nothing ’cause they said that our work wasn’t skilled
We didn’t know that everything could actually run out
Well, we knew, but it wasn’t something that we talked about
I guess we thought someone would figure it out
But nobody did and it all came down
We didn’t have time to put our seeds in the ground
and that’s why you look around you and there’s no trees now
I wonder if the people living back in late antiquity
Were conscious of their context in the arc of broader history
When Rome was falling all around them, did they think the end was near?
Or did they tell themselves that things would settle down next year?
Did they wonder like I wonder if the fall of the Empire
Would liberate the world and set the treasuries on fire?
We might be smart enough to lay a trap where we can trick it
But it might be strong enough to bring the lot of us down with it
It might just fall apart when it’s exceeded its own limits
Rome probably felt eternal, to the people living in it.
And I just hope we’re ready
For the hurricane we’re facing
But when they REEEEEAAAALLY need to
Humans can be quite amazing.