Resistance moon: Dreaming my cubs about the den

Since today I’m celebrating the more than 600 Marches for Science held around the world on Saturday, it seems like a good time to have a poem that’s not, perhaps, a protest, but an elegy for the things we’ve lost and will continue to lose because of policy makers’ science denial.

I frankly don’t much give a toss why these people fly at Mach 3 directly into the face of facts—whether it’s religion or greed that blinds them. Stupid is stupid, and the Kleptocrat and his Gauleiters are certainly leading the charge in the stupid stakes.

Okay, for a scientifically-themed poem, I’m calling on Irish poet, playwright, lyricist and teacher Paula Meehan. Meehan earned her stripes in the resistance army as a teenager, when she was expelled from Saint Michael’s Holy Faith Convent School in Finglas for organizing a protest march against the school administration. She eventually earned a degree from Trinity College Dublin, and then an MFA from Eastern Washington University.

Meehan puts herself at the vortex of the arts—writing poems that have become songs, and others for film producers, dance companies street theatre groups.

“The Solace of Artemis” is about climate change—appropriate for the weekend’s focus. We frequently refer to Artemis, twin to Apollo, by the shorthand label, “goddess of the hunt”. She was actually more than that. Homer called her “Artemis of the wildland, Mistress of Animals”; she was the conservator of the wilderness and of wild animals. Yep—she was a hunter but she kept things in balance. (She’s also the goddess of childbirth and virginity, and the protector of young girls.)

So it makes sense that here the poet-goddess takes comfort in the connection between the Irish brown bear and her majestic descendants. The contrast between the mama bear in the cave with her honied cubs and the children of the machine caring only about getting cheap memory (as in silicon chips? or something more ephemeral, like cheap vacation memories?) is as sharp as a Celtic spear.

"The Solace of Artemis"

I read that every polar bear alive has mitochondrial DNA

from a common mother, an Irish brown bear who once

roved out across the last ice age, and I am comforted.

It has been a long hot morning with the children of the machine,

their talk of memory, of buying it, of buying it cheap, but I,

memory keeper by trade, scan time coded in the golden hive mind

of eternity. I burn my books, I burn my whole archive:

a blaze that sears, synapses flaring cell to cell where

memory sleeps in the wax hexagonals of my doomed and melting comb.

I see him loping towards me across the vast ice field

to where I wait in the cave mouth, dreaming my cubs about the den,

my honied ones, smelling of snow and sweet oblivion.