Note from the author:

In India, farmer suicides have become commonplace. Farmers, misled by government agents and advertisements into using GMO seeds, after planting, learn details like this: unlike old school seeds, frequent, costly chemical treatments are needed to keep these GMO plants alive. Irrigation is needed. Too late they learn that their inability to read English fine print has cost them their season’s harvest, their incomes, the food their children need to survive. It is bone chilling.

This is a note which one farmer may have left, unseen and unread, blowing along the rows of his once fertile, now ruined land.

It rains. Rain surrounds me.

This once would have caused me great joy. Today, my thirst is unslaked.

Impotence, rage and red-faced fury, today all are burned into resignation.

Holding a jug of your killing Roundup, I drink. 

The relief I feel with the flow of poison is my freedom. Stepping off the planet, I will discover a land of real meadows, un-engineered animals, alive, unpolluted waters; I will meet undead weeds with new and quiet reverence.

There is no way to win at this game. Your company and corporate parents have rigged it.

At the expense of me, of my land, you gain a tiny crumb. My children and my home, microscopic food. My brother farmers, all of us together almost make up a portion of a bite at your vast, untroubled corporate table.

Tagore spoke of the life force which “shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.” What might he have said about the poisons and chemicals now showered over our fields, the layer of death and sorrow coating what once were our meadows?

Life is owned by death. I return myself today to my owner. Partially used, wholly spent.

Outcry at thousands and thousands of my brother suicides was stilled. You bought deafness. The cold steel totalitarian corporate hand clenches around me.

My heart is heavier than an ox.

I know. I see. There is no fighting this. This is too big for me. You are impervious. My prayers are for you. For your hands. For your voice. For your heart.

For my part, drinking this poison, choosing death, I let this bowing to death and this mass enslavement end.

Let the life force that shoots through the dust of the earth, into my body and soul, beget life through my deed.

Those farmers were alive. The seed of their farms, culled and saved for generations, was real. They were living people, with heartbeats and children and parents of their own. They laughed and cried.

We are all diminished by this loss.

This robbery.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXh_1-6wYLw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av6dx9yNiCA&list=PLE009CEB0E7717315

Addendum:

Frontline (PBS)

Center for Human Rights and Global Justice’s “Every 30 Minutes” (PDF)

~

Ed: Bryonie Wise

Like elephant journal on Facebook.