TRIBUTUM
Tineke Van der Eecken – 2021
Tributum, a statement of gratitude.
How a river flows into a greater water:
lake, sea. How the worth of one
pays the other. We are waterways.
Our blood connects with the Aral Sea:
salt desert where ancestors fished.
A shrinking womb split into three lakes –
climate no longer moderated by sea.
Lake Chad inland seas dry up;
shore retreats from Nigeria and Niger.
Fish farmers move with the lake,
leave irrigation plants dry.
We are waterways.
Our veins swallow the breathing wetlands.
Part of the Tributaries Exhibition
Machala, Bolivia’s Santa Cruz,
the brackish intertidal coasts
of Para State, mouth of the Amazon.
Delta extends with the drop of silt in riverbeds.
In China, the Yellow River grows beaks,
each new channel a promise of farmland
or catastrophe. Ataturk’s wall of rock and earth across the river near Urfa, Kurdish land,
40,000 displaced. A dam hoards water,
halts the flow into Syria and Iraq’s Mesopotamian
marshes. Tributum, our statement of gratitude
for fish, freshwater, arable land.
Our thanks to the goats and sheep, the cattle and pigs.
Now there are more of them than us.
