Monster

                                      by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

                                  A spoken voice poem 

Sometimes I wonder if Marshallese women are the chosen one

I wonder if someone selected us from a stack. Drew us out slow, methodical and then issued the order.

Give birth to a nightmare.

Show the world what happens when the sun explodes inside you.

How many stories of nuclear war are hidden in our bodies?

574- the number of miscarriages and stillbirths after the bombs. Before the bombs- 52.

Bella told the UN she could no longer have children. They say their friends give birth to ugly things.

Derek gave birth to something resembling the eggs of a sea turtle 

and Flora gave birth to something resembling intestines.

She told this to a committee of men who washed their hands of this sin-

These women who gave birth to unholy things -

created from exploding spit and ugly things.

And how these women buried their nightmares. Beneath a coconut tree. Pretended it never happened.

Sinister.  Hideous. Monster.  More jellyfish than child. 

And yet.  They could see the chest inhale. Exhale.  Could it be human?

 Kathy is a poet and climate activist in the Marshal Islands.  I don't think anyone could better describe the impact of atomic bomb testing on mothers and babies in the Marshal Islands and the impact of their continued use.  I struggle to write this blog in the midst of the pandemic that faces the world.  But I know the virus, like these babies, is the earth crying; the earth asking us to pay attention,  be kinder, gentler and more generous.

   Everything we put in the air, the soil and the water ends up in a developing fetus.  In my country, we pollute the growing babies with air, water and soil pollution.  We run gas and oil pipelines through vulnerable communities.  The harm done to the developing child, is not always as apparent as what happened in this poem.  Babies are born premature or with severe learning disabilities.  Removed and displaced over and over again, their parents struggle to provide stable and secure lives.  The poverty that inevitably results from environmental degradation, is quickly followed by discrimination, shunning and class based isolation.   

I leave this poem with you, my sometime reader, with a sad heart.  Isn't it enough to watch emergency hospitals constructed in New York City's Central Park?  Isn't it enough o be sheltering in place?  And so, I would reflect that it is all connected.  This poem, these stories of mothers after atomic bomb testing and this virus that is embedded in our communities.  

At dusk, we sing to our neighbors.  We bang on pots and bans.  We say, "We are still here."  We say, "We will survive this."   And I might offer, that our survival in ways I wish I could document with science, our connected to the survival of the Marshal Islands and Haiti and the people of New York City.  

That when we sing, that when we pray, that when we shout- it is for all the world's people.