RACHEL CARSON – 1907-1964

The following poem is from a sequence of mine called Homeric America, which focuses on American wanderers and warriors. Rachel Carson was a warrior for the environment. I offer this poem at the turning of the year 2021 for those of us who are ready to make the healing of climate change, the cleaning up of the ubiquitous dregs of the Pollution Industrial Complex and the promotion of sane public health policies among our top political priorities for the next four years.

From HOMERIC AMERICA

RACHEL CARSON – 1907-1964
by V.B. Price

Guide me, stern muses, to a voice that can say
this life of outrage and of duty’s honor,
this generous life that gave its health away
to tell unwelcome truths and show
what no one wants to see, the secret welts and bruises
of crude, manslaughtering abuse.

It has come to this, so far —
that nothing she saw and suffered, nothing

has changed in 60 years — a law or two but nothing more —
in a time when everything else has changed,

from linotypes to laptops,
the Cold War, the Soviet collapse,

podcasts, cellphones, the nano juggling of atoms —
only the belittling, the sour lying,

the arrogant scorn, the supercilious
claims of expert hirelings,

only these sinkholes in conscience
have stayed the same, covering up

a lethal and lecherous neglect
so profit preachers in power blue suits

will never perp walk, puke with guilt, pay up.
An agent of reality, of which most of us

“cannot bear very much,” Rachel Carson
witnessed the execution-gas invisibility,

the fatal fog of fortune-making
subsidized by zero-cost pollution,
pick-pocket lobbyists lifting tax breaks:
“The perfume of those pesticides

is the scent of freedom.
Let the market ring.”

But Carson, dignified, patriotic,
loyal to the land, she served the true

uncertainty of science in the savage first
skirmishes with those for whom

everything could be sacrificed
to a single end, and any means to get there, even

cancer profits, moth-eaten, mad
growth ideology fueled by a criminal

fleecing of the poor-to-do, conning them
to think they could afford what they could not

pay for, endless growth, the unstoppable
delusion, writing off the future

health of children, like a bad speculation,
and the lives of anyone too frail financially to fight back.

These were the covert addicts
of the vice of wealth she fought,

the fixers who buy off science tricksters
to dope up data into decoy facts,

distracting us with doubts to cover up
the money lechery of their intent.

And she could see their scam coming,
like gypsies swarming and feasting on rubes,

making propaganda seem like the noble
uncertainty of science schilling for the “truth.”

Doubt the searchers, who doubt themselves,
serving reality, free of everything but data,

counter them with bribed savants
who serve and cannot doubt a lying master.

More, More, More, the Sin of More
bulging with wasted plenty, dosing us

with careless malice one by one while we
hand over our heads and wallets

to conveyor belt white coats as if
they were faith healers feasting on patients

then drooling for treats. Even she
couldn’t face it at first.

“Some of the thoughts…were so unattractive…
I rejected them completely….It was pleasant to believe…

that much of Nature was forever beyond
the tampering reach of man.” To have such thoughts

“even vaguely threatened was so shocking
that I shut my mind — refused to acknowledge

what I couldn’t help seeing.” What she saw
seemed impossible, a sleight of mind: whole businesses,

gentlemen of good standing, willfully, secretly,
turning the land they live on into a toilet that spews

shit into the lungs of their own children,
using the land up like a slave as if it were worthless

without being used, exhausted
without a cost, the whole earth

a frayed old rug to sweep
crimes under until it gets

so bumpy the dog trips
and falls into the cat who leaps

and knocks over the lamp
that hits you on the knee

and sends you reeling into a wall
for a fatal concussion. Absurd as it is,

as making money off killing yourself,
you and your chances are still

dead as doornails. Killing bugs
that eat profits with stuff that can kill

everything around it, including you,
if you have the right cocktail of genes

and history, is like smoking, like building
bombs so big they require whole cities of the sick

to make them, to make tens of thousands of them
when five or ten of them could ruin the world

as we know it, and all of us in it,
good genes or not.

Carson couldn’t be scammed.
She knew that everything

is connected to everything else;
that everything has to go somewhere,

that you can’t orphan the land without
it coming back to take you down

like starving wolves catch the sleigh
and ravage you and your exhausted horses.

It took all her genius for truth
to believe her own eyes:

that it was possible
to commit suicide

without knowing it,
using the laughing gas

of terminal mass stupidity,
suckling on a death-psychosis economy

that righteously debunks humility,
and caution, as bad for business,

that it’s possible for us to butcher ourselves
with tools we can’t control, cutting off our own

limbs with chainsaws that break
our shoulder joints and fall

ripping through a thigh or shin.
Who could believe it? Who could believe

that Martini men, Sunday sluggers,
barbecue masters, Little League dads,

did what they were told, dumped
poison where kids could get at it

just to keep their jobs
and feed their own.

No, no, no, they were told,
there’s ample room for doubt

that if you pull the pin and release the handle
the grenade won’t explode.

Everyone knows that. Just keep the thing
in a drawer, the kids won’t find it.

These dark blisterings of hubris
are so farcical, even the touchy gods

are embarrassed and turn away.
Not Rachel Carson. Such monstrosities

were for her a natural history
to be defined, the quest of a lifetime,

important enough for her to risk
being in public who she was in the farthest

most private part of herself, fearless
in the face of abhorred anomalies,

schoolmarm steady, rock salt of the earth,
old fashioned as spine, stern,

decent, never one to abandon
the troubles that needed her heart.

She was called to the good and the true.
She couldn’t refuse. And she didn’t.

They gave her a life to be proud of
as the stress of honor

helped the cancer polish her off,
her life a storm full of enemies,

like aphid squalls on roses, chewing on
anyone more concerned with health

than wealth, turning her into
a doily of misogyny, an hysteric prude,

a sweet old dingbat dealing in false fear,
pushing caution like a drug.

Does it sound novelistic to say that? It’s not.
Polluters really don’t care. That’s the ultimate

shock, the wild reality. Business
is a team sport. Take no prisoners, win,

no flinching, never lose
or you’re lost. The paycheck,

steak on the table, breadwinner pride,
us against them, these easily

justify any means. And besides,
no one, of course, except an actual fiend,

thinks they’re doing anyone harm.
Chlorinated hydrocarbons, like the miracle

of DDT, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane,
that kills enemy germs, while killing

their victims like a sniper at long range
that no one can see. Same for chlordane,

heptachlor, dioxin, dieldrin, aldrin,
endrin, nerve gases used to kill bugs

and trench trapped soldiers,
parathion, malathion, and a cosmos more,

including radionuclids plentiful as cannibal beetles,
and in all doses, all at once, or in as many

breaths as one takes in a decade, deadly as venom.
“We make jobs. We put food on your table.

Our business is based on science for better living.
How can we do wrong? We’re innocent

until proven guilty. We know we’re not bad,
so nothing bad will probably happen.

You’ll have to prove your slander
beyond a reasonable doubt.

We doubt harm and danger.
That’s enough to acquit us.”

(Just as probable cause
is enough to indict.)

But there’s no crime until
something terrible happens

‘beyond our control.’
It’s all a muddle of intent.

No one wants to assume evil.
But we are left with suspicions

of callousness, inattention, indifference.
But malice aforethought?

A conspiracy to make money
by killing off consumers

when they’re finally too old any more
to consume? Not beyond the realm

of the spreadsheet, the quarterly report
and actuarial, though without, of course

direct intent? Oh, come on.
Not giving a hoot

is a moral sin of omission.
But like the great wanderer,

Carson was true
to her orbit too.

Her standards
were a gamble

not worth the risk
of not taking.

She spoke the evidence, saw
cancer’s tracks, amazing

as a leopard’s stalking us
idle in our harmless sloth and sloppiness,

its tracks all around us
while we cheat and feign,

hiding our poisoned socks
under the bed.

She would gather what strength she could
from radiation knowing full well

that what killed the cancer
could kill her, and was surely a cousin

of what caused her body such pain,
though never mentioning its obvious source.

And if she had referenced her health,
they’d have used it against her,

accused her of using the cancer card
like a girlie trick to pull pity.

She would have burned off her hand
before doing something like that,

so Roman, so Stoic she turned out to be.
She knew that when “that intangible

cycle had run its course,
it was natural and no unhappy thing

that a life comes to an end.”
To think otherwise would be

a final folly of “man against
himself” and the order of the way it is.

Everything dies, soft or hard, early or on time.
Some go like wiping the countertop of dust,

whole species mopped up; some go tortured, some
die in the bed they were born in. Rachel Carson

felt the cancer in her bones every step she took;
she did not want to cause pain or premature

annihilation for anything, even indirectly.
“It is time that human beings admit

their kinship
with other forms of life.”

You don’t harm your relatives, unless
you’re a sociopath. Making whales go deaf

from sonar just wouldn’t happen if
we knew who we really are, flesh and blood

kin with all life in the world. It’s really
no different than giving a baby

boiling water to stop it crying without
knowing what the water will do, or why

it’s hot — this making of things
and using them without

calculating risk, paving the way
through carelessness

so a new technique
is “embedded in a vast

economic and political
commitment” almost as impossible

to stop as compound interest,
as a train roaring full bore

through a sleepy town.
We live in “a sea of carcinogens.”

Rather than stop the way
of life that made them

and rebuild a world we can bear,
we choose to try to cure

the cancers we’ve loosed upon us.
And why not prevention

over cure?
We all know why.

She knew why
as she was dying

and being ridiculed
by her proxy killers.

Even wonder can’t
snooker the lust for profit.

You can’t stop money
from making money,

until it can make
as much or more

another way. And that’s
why the big curtain

has come undone
and dropped on the stage

way before the end
was meant to commence,

the house going dark
and time running out

before being over,
the circle of health

an open wound
pumping out life

like a pool of blood
in a spot light,

with all eyes blank,
opaque cloudy stares.

NOTE: Rachel Carson died of a heart attack in 1964 some two years after the publication of Silent Spring, at age 54. Weakened by radiotherapy, the cancer spreading to her pelvis and spleen, suffering from anemia and pneumonia, she continued to give witness to the literally unbelievable madness she saw so clearly until weeks before she died.