[A project I’ve been working on for a while, and it’s time to give it some light.]
A token for the sweet and blameless dead,
the fallen facets of this jewelled earth
each loss a weakened place, a broken strand
in this our fraying web. A token for
the innocent and lost, each missing piece,
each lineage a blood mark on our hands,
each clan now truncated a testament
to our sad, myopic carelessness
and cruelty. Evil nests within evil.
Plow up the meadows, cut the forests down
for toothpicks, scrape the ocean bottom clean
with your trawling nets. This living earth,
this layer of biotic froth, miles-thick
and occult, from stratospheric spores
living on light down to the archaea
that dwell within the torrid depths of earth,
scratching a living out of barest rock;
this living Earth will pale, attenuate
and this roiling foam-spume of species
be lost among the rats and tumbleweeds.
Empty your bile onto the riverbank,
loose cats onto the flightless-birded isles,
pave every inch of it, scour every face
of every mountainside: regretting not:
Others will pay. Uncountable millions
already lost, unknown. One cannot think
to enumerate them all, lest the
sheer enormity of loss smother
one’s soul in sorrow, suck the oxygen
out of the lungs, and yet what sinister
contempt to drive them off the edge unnamed,
their endings unremarked upon. What words
suffice? What words tribute enough to mark
this mass, atrocious passing? Shoal sprites
by the legion should arise out of
these letterforms. My mouth should open up
in clouds of chestnut ermine moths, my voice
a ragged sorrow-howl of thylacine
and Falkland island wolf, the metal yawp
of Carolina parakeet that once
raised hairs upon the hunters’ napes, not these
few pallid human words in a tumult
of far too many human words. Give me
the voice of the Las Vegas leopard frog,
let my rasp-fingers stridulate the songs
of Antioch Dunes shieldback katydids,
give me an Auroch’s strength, tenacity
like the scimitar-horned oryces’,
the blithe trust of the dodo, insistence
like the passenger pigeon’s, make my words
emphatic as Hawai’ian crows’ to pierce
as the Jamaican red macaw’s shrill pierced
the preColumbian air; grant me the grace
of the laughing owl and the humor
of the Steller’s sea cow, that I might
tell their stories as each one merits.
Make these eyes stolid, opaque, like the
insular cave rat’s, that tears might not
impede these tales. Give me the speed of the
Saudi gazelle, that the toll not increase
by overmuch before this litany
is ended. Lend me all the steadfastness
of the late indefatigable
Galapagos mouse. Give me the fervor
of the giant vampire bat, stealth like
the sea mink’s stealth. Let my belated words
fly like the white-winged sandpiper. Let them
fall upon the ears of the content
of the complacent, of the complicit;
let these insufficient, tawdry words
settle as the Franklinia’s leaves
upon these billions of un-noted graves.
Uncounted generations in the mire
of time with us now cut, now truncated
only the litany remains: the names
at least of those we credited with names,
for of the many thousands more that passed
with no notice, gone irrevocably,
one can say little. These are the sweet
and blameless dead, our careless casualties,
the bleak collateral with which we’ve bought
our lives new-pallid and depauperate.
1 comment on "The Litany: Part One (In Medias Res)"
An amazing, deep and sensitive piece. I am enjoying it thoroughly and going now to read part two.
Years ago, at Emma Wood State Park, I sat quietly with a beach sea lion calf who was stranded.
The ranger would not give me permission to get help for it (I had connections then), and in the evening, the calf so ill with an obvious respiratory problem, was herded back to the water by the ranger.
But several years after that, in a 7-seat diner in Coloma, CA, I heard two rangers discussing a crazy lady who tried to rescue a sea lion calf who made a lot of noise and trouble for the state park personnel. Of course, I introduced myself.
Who would think that in a town of 150 (we made it 153), I was still making noise!?
It takes one person with passion, anger and persistence to make a difference.
Maybe I did.
I don’t know.
Congratulations on this.
Hope to read more soon. I’m on Linked-In, too.