We broke the silence.
We misread anguish as
threat, flail for oxygen as attempted assault, taken down, wounded.
Warhead accidentally
slipped to the Mediterranean Sea, then upon rescue effort, we fumbled it lower,
unreachable trophy, case deterioration.
We installed temporary
art in the park from thrown out materials to disrupt continuity of hatred in
the community, to heal.
We had a crazy hunch how
things so heavy got here, disturbed bones, patterned thought, quarried first
causes, harp recordings.
Power lines in the
city-edge plant we hacked just coming online, restoration play, just kind of electrical
charges, juice suspended.
We picketed, not to
violate the code, Nuremberg, not to bomb the open market in Guernica, Spain,
not to have allies violate the principles in Palestine.
Please Respond, Break
Silence. (“Bumblebees”)
The
latest from
California poet Deborah Meadows, the author of more than a dozen
titles—including
Translation – the bass accompaniment: Selected Poems
(Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2013) [
see my review of such here] and
Neo-bedrooms
(Shearsman Books, 2021) [
see my review of such here]—is
Bumblebees (New
York NY: Roof Books, 2024), an assemblage of declarative, expansive and
sequenced prose poems. Bees, of course, are the literal ‘canaries in the coal
mine’ when it comes to climate change, and poets have been engaged with bees with
this in mind for moons, with recent examples being
Toronto poet Andy Weaver’s Were
The Bees (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2005) [
see my review of such here],
the late American poet ‘Annah Sobelman’s In the Bee Latitudes (Berkeley
CA: University of California Press, 2012) [
see my review of such here] or the
climate-overt
Listening to the Bees (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions,
2018), a collaborative work by scientist Mark Winston and Vancouver poet Renée
Sarojini Saklikar. Constructed as a book-length suite, Meadows’
Bumblebees
is a collection on elements of natural infrastructure, “the daunting complexity
of earthly existence in the climate-changing present’” (as
Carla Harryman
writes as part of her back cover blurb), from bees to mushrooms, all of which are
under global threat due to climate change. “We made terrible mistakes,” she
writes, as part of the title sequence, “got off the train at the wrong stop, /
miscalculated how much our earth could take. // Maintenance of vision is
marking our minds as we convene a / forest of signs and get on.” Her poems
stretch, extend and endlessly thread, providing mitochondrial connections
between pages, between poems, that hold the collection together as an
impressive single unit of composition.
The
pacing, the patter, especially across the title sequence, is quietly
performative in a way one can hear the sentences lift from each page, writing chemical
impact, climate emergency, stolen lives, declarations and elegance, a language of
hoping against hope even through all the worst of what is already happening. A
highlight among highlights, it holds as the foundation for the collection as a
whole, a narrative that furthers and furthers along, a conversation that allows
for endless variation and possibility. “We didn’t need squirrels to learn how
to chatter; we followed / our conscience.” she writes, “Thigh-deep we face the
sea’s extent: good primates like us / groom, spell, frame retreat as The
Sentinels of No Outer Point.”
