New poem by thiscantbehappenings poet, Gary Lindorff

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Black River

Ebola, "Black River",

Thank-you for giving your name

To a killer virus.

Those scientists, those doctors,

The ones who discovered the germ,

They looked at a map

And they saw the river Ebola.

That's a good name!

They almost named it Yambuku

After the town

Where the virus was actually discovered.

It was three o'clock in the morning.

That's how these things go.

Now in the midst of all the fear,

The suffering,

Paranoia and heroism,

And the usual belated scrambling

To do the right thing,

I am thinking,

What a beautiful name

For that little river in the Congo:

Ebola, Black River.

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.